[HN Gopher] Show HN: Calenday, real-time collaborative calendars... ___________________________________________________________________ Show HN: Calenday, real-time collaborative calendars for trip planning Author : jaflo Score : 149 points Date : 2022-03-18 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (calenday.co) (TXT) w3m dump (calenday.co) | azinman2 wrote: | My 2 cents: | | It's really hard to get consumers to switch behaviors for | something they already can do through other means. Perhaps this | is more efficient in some respect, but only if you ignore the | inefficiency of changing your ways to learn a new tool, and | further separate it from your existing communications medium (ie | text messaging or whatever). I don't feel like the value | proposition is super high here. | | In general people only tend to use 7 apps, and to create | something for a rare activity will be very hard to keep in mind | when you go to do it. So capturing the moment when people need to | do it with when they find out about you is difficult to time... | and that's if you can convince them to try something new at all. | | If you're going consumer specifically for trip planning, I'd | focus more on specific pain points versus "nice to haves". It's | not clear from the website that pain points are considered. It | also feels very structured, eg that you know how long you'd stop | at a given place. In practice I don't think many people operate | that way, especially for a vacation unless they have | reservations. | | I'd suggest finding a niche with clear pain points that this | solves, and then focus on that demographic. That may likely not | include consumers. | | Good luck, it's really hard to make something new, put yourself | out there, and know whether to stick with it or not. I've been | down this road before. If you don't try, it really won't work! | [deleted] | noirbot wrote: | I think I mostly agree with you, but I definitely have a set of | apps that I install for only trips. | | I had a trip back in November with 6 people in total, and | plenty of sub-groups going off to do stuff, along with full- | group reservations with fixed times. It would have been helpful | to have something like this instead of having to search a text | thread repeatedly to work out when dinner reservations are and | on which days. | | One specific idea - There's apps like this where if I could pay | a sort of "rental" fee to create a calendar for one event | instead of a full time subscription, that would be great. I | don't do big group trips that need something like this all the | time, but I'd maybe pay $10 or such for access for 2 months for | 4-8 people. | | One really important feature for me would be some good time- | zone support as well, both for trips that may span different | time zones, and for converting from local to remote trip times. | azinman2 wrote: | Why not just use google calendar? You can invite people to | events, so it doesn't need to be a shared calendar. | heyitsguay wrote: | Just use your favorite online spreadsheet - for group trips | with more than about 3 people, I've been using Google Sheets | for trip planning for years. It's easy, effective, and free. | [deleted] | jaflo wrote: | I definitely agree that it is difficult to make users switch if | there isn't enough of a value add. I was hoping for features | like the suggestions and voting to give enough of a reason to | switch, but admit that it might not be enough. | | I really appreciate your comment about finding a niche and | fixing pain points there. Certainly a less clear path, but more | fruitful too as you mentioned. | | Good points, thank you for taking the time to put this | together! | SmellTheGlove wrote: | Wow I was about to start developing something similar for my own | needs. I'll give this a try instead! | haolez wrote: | Slightly related, but I remember seeing in the past an | app/startup that offered a tool to manage the entire companies' | calendar, where it tried to optimize everyone's agenda by | rescheduling as many meetings as possible close to each other, so | everyone would have a lot of continuous free time to focus on | more demanding tasks. | | But I can't find it again no matter how hard I look! Has anyone | here seen anything like this? I hope they are still around :( | tedmiston wrote: | There are so so many calendar scheduling optimization apps | these days. | | Motion and Calendly are the ones I hear about most. | haolez wrote: | Thanks! Motion seems to be exactly what I was looking for. | darkgreene wrote: | https://www.getclockwise.com/ ? That's what our team is using | for this problem and it seems to work relatively well | eddyg wrote: | I'm curious what benefits you see something like this offering | over a more "full-fledged" collaborative trip-planning solution | like https://wanderlog.com/? The benefits of a full-featured | travel-planner outweigh a calendar, especially when it does | things like automatically calculate the driving time between | stops. Other travel partners can "like" things, create new | "lists" for whatever ("possible hotels", "restaurants", | "attractions", etc.) and then drag them down to specific days. | And you can "share a link" to the trip for others to just _view_ | , or invite others to collaborate... | pkulak wrote: | Nice! Using it now for a trip I'm leaving on in a few hours. :D | | It would be nice to share a link that folks can suggest, without | signing up. Kinda hard to get a bunch of people to make accounts | on something last minute, and I'd be okay being the one who slots | suggestions into times and does general management. | | EDIT: Adding events is a bit painful. I've been conditioned to | click on a calendar where I want the event, then fill in details. | Running through every field of a date time in order (day, hour, | am/pm, etc) for start and end is a lot of friction. | jaflo wrote: | Thank you! This is really nice to hear! And good idea as well, | I will look into adding an open suggestion mode. | | I should surface this better, but you can click and drag on the | calendar or drag the event button to the calendar to quick add! | pkulak wrote: | Oh wow, I just tried Google Calendar, and that's exactly how | you do it there also. Looks like I missed the memo on the | standard way to interact with calendar apps. I mean, if | Google has never communicated that to me, should you be | required to? Tough call... | | EDIT: Fastmail too. lol. | abdullahkhalids wrote: | I am a professor. What I want is for students to quickly and | efficiently book 15 meeting slots with me during pre-defined | times and they should appear in my calender. | | My university uses the Office365 suite, and I don't think the | above is possible. Either I share my entire Busy/Free calender | with them, and specify acceptable times in some other way. Or do | a back and forth with them via email. | qazxcvbnmlp wrote: | Calendly does exactly that. | robertlagrant wrote: | Aaah I wanted to make something like this! Good to see someone | actually do it. | mcint wrote: | Thank you for building this. I have been meaning to, for a few | years. | | I would suggest that, like when2meet, this should support | coordination without every person having signed up. Perhaps | require 1 person to have an account to host a day's coordination, | but allow coordinators lower friction to use that day without | signup. Allow account signup to be a convenient upgrade, rather | than a minimum required. I support I wish there were view-urls | and edit-urls. | | I appreciate that you don't hint at marketing emails permission, | nor have early signs of turning this into a business like ToS or | Privacy Policy. It would however be comforting, clarifying, to | share about the person or entity developing and hosting this. | alexk307 wrote: | I would definitely use this, but Google Cal has most of these | features, except the voting part. I can already collaborate on a | shared cal with my friends or colleagues that sync directly to my | devices (e.g. details, times, links, tickets, locations, etc.). | What differentiates you from existing calendar apps that would | pull users away from the Google/Apple ecosystem? | jaflo wrote: | I also use Google Calendar, but in my experience sync between | calendars across users is slow unless you send out invites for | each event (instead of sharing a calendar). Calenday is | supposed to be a real-time solution (updates happen near- | instantly). It also allows you to add the plan to external | calendar apps, but with a delay (imposed by the external | service). | | I hope for Calenday to implement features specifically for trip | planning (although I am also trying to find other | applications). Ideas I were considering are adding location- | aware functionality like figuring out travel time and such. | gxs wrote: | Honestly, the best I've found for planning trips is creating a | custom google maps with all your personal points of interests | along with notes, etc. | | Then planning becomes trivial - hey let's hit up spots a, b, and | c. | | Everyone knows what those are, where they are, notes on them, and | everyone is sure they are going to the same address. | | This app is cool but I imagine it appeals to a certain kind of | traveler more than broadly appealing to anyone taking a trip. | | My two cents. | siscia wrote: | I like it! | | However, I would like an interface a more long term and with | fewer details. | | Like I am planning the next summer with my SO, and I would like | to know which day each of us is in which continent. So the | interface should show me days, not hours. | | I am not sure I was able to explain | SamBam wrote: | Sounds like there should also be a fuzzy "sometime in late | August"-type scheduling. | | A way to pencil in events and sketch out a vacation. | culpable_pickle wrote: | As a trip-it free tier user, it's not clear to me why this is a | better choice. Is the value add purely the voting? | jaflo wrote: | I haven't used it myself, but it looks like the goals are | different. TripIt is meant for trip planning for a single | person and organizing travel and stay mainly. Calenday is meant | for cross-user collaboration of trips and getting consensus on | activities between multiple people. | sbecker wrote: | I use TripIt for multi-person travel itineraries. It does | allow for sharing and multiple contributors. It is not | necessarily for getting consensus on activities, but for | centralizing all of your confirmed plans in one place. | u2077 wrote: | Looks great! | | Are there any resources in particular that helped you along the | way, and may be worth sharing? | | (Specifically for integrating auth and calendar events) | | I am building something for personal use to manage calendar, | todos, and time tracking | jaflo wrote: | Thank you! | | I had personally not used stores a lot before, but realized how | powerful they were in the project. I would try to abstract away | as much as possible of the Firebase stuff and having your | components talk to the store as data source. This makes it a | lot easier for real-time stuff to work right (but also auth, | you want to make sure to update state across the page once | users log in or out). | tylermenezes wrote: | This looks like a wonderful tool, but I would be hesitant to use | it solely because I'm sure Calendly's IP lawyers will try to shut | you down for the name. (It's similar enough that I mistook the HN | post for Calendly several times.) | samspenc wrote: | +1 as a heavy Calendly user (with plenty of friends who also | use Calendly), I initially mistook this for a post promoting | Calendly. | wpietri wrote: | This is interesting, but for me the barrier to entry is too high | for me to try it out absent an urgent need. | | Right now I'm thinking about visiting family sometime this summer | and want to figure out the best time, so some sort of joint | calendar might be good. But I can solve this problem adequately | the usual way. I read through the front page and thought, "Oh, | maybe!" But then I got to "Sign up or log in" and that was enough | of a barrier that I closed the window. | | The way to get me to take the next step would be to let me try | the product anonymously, with just a unique link. Maybe a link | that I can forward, as with Google Docs, to anybody I want to be | involved. If I find it useful, then I'd be much more willing to | jump through signup and account-linking hoops. | pcj-github wrote: | Reminded of https://www.phocuswire.com/Why-you-should-never- | consider-a-t... | gwoplock wrote: | This came just in time. So far I'm super happy with it. | | One feature I think would be cool to have would be a check | in/check out time for the first and last day. Other than that I | really like it and will be super useful. | | Good luck! | ivyirwin wrote: | Congrats on the launch. My company tried to tackle collaborative | trip planning too by doing a shared itinerary | (https://www.lunamoons.com). We went as far as collaborative | booking where people could split the charge at time of | reservation. It's a tricky space but would be happy chat about | lessons learned in the monetization space if you're interested. | Email is in profile, shoot me a note if you want to connect. | jaflo wrote: | Hi HN! | | I built this website after having to recreate the same Google | Sheets template over and over for different trips. This is | basically Google Docs for calendars along with some other helpful | features like voting and categories for trip ideas. | | The website itself was built using SvelteKit with Firebase for | the database and authentication, all hosted on Vercel. | | Feel free to ask anything! | asleepawake wrote: | how did you manage real time collaboration in sveltekit? are | relying completely on firebase? | jaflo wrote: | Correct, yes, I subscribe to the Firebase Cloud Firestore | events and update a Svelte store whenever something changes. | This way I only need to set up the connections once and every | Svelte component can just subscribe to updates to the store. | | Writing is more challenging, I haven't found a nice solution | so I resort to making calls with the Firebase SDK directly | (but those updates are then surfaced nicely again through the | store). | MetaWhirledPeas wrote: | Suggestion: the Share form should perform an invite. Instead it | tells me "This email address does not belong to a registered | user account". Makes recruiting your friends and family a bit | tougher! | elefanten wrote: | Thanks for sharing. | | Very trivial feedback here: Calendly has gotten pretty | prominent and your app's name is so similar that I misread it | as Calendly (and wondered "why is Calendly doing Show HN and | what's this about trip planning?") | benatkin wrote: | That's a good move by OP. Too bad for Calendly. I can't think | of a reasonable argument that it's trademark infringement. A | portmanteau with _day_ is quite different from a -ly suffix. | Levenshtein distance is irrelevant. | doctor_eval wrote: | When the law is basically "shoot first and ask questions | later" - and it is - then semantic arguments don't matter. | If it seems similar, it is similar. | joenathanone wrote: | Plans for monetization? | wuschel wrote: | Hi, | | great project, and looks very neat :) | | I would be very curious to hear about any difficulties when | implementing actual collaborative editing. Did you have to go | into CRDTs and friends? | | Cheers! | andrewshadura wrote: | I wish someone recreated Google Trips. Like TripIt, but with | better UX and more magic aurorecognition. Preferably self-hosted | and with IMAP or JMAP support, so I can give it a folder or a tag | to import trips from. | krat0sprakhar wrote: | 100% .. I love google trips but it can be improved by a lot. | I'm afraid of giving my email access to anybody else apart from | Google (only because they already have my mail). Ability to | collaborate and add other events etc on google trips would be | great. | andrewshadura wrote: | Well, Google Trips doesn't exist as an app anymore. What's | left is a much less functional web app and a trip section in | Google Maps. | pupppet wrote: | I like the idea but the Calendly suits may have something to say | about your name. | antidnan wrote: | Neat! | | A collaborative itinerary seems really useful. | | Any plans to add or design features around coordinating flights | for these types of trips? In my experience this tends to be the | hardest thing to keep track of collaboratively. I've actually | also seen friends using spreadsheets to track flights. It could | be cool to add a feature that shows when everyone is landing or | leaving. | jaflo wrote: | That's a really cool idea! A friend mentioned something | similar. I will look into that, I think the UX might be hard to | nail down. | | I am not sure on how to best indicate it, but it might be | interesting to show availability of each person as a shaded | background. Darker shade would mean more people present. I will | put it on my backlog, thank you! | ehaughee wrote: | A couple ideas come to mind solving slightly different | problems | | 1. Flight discovery | | It would be interesting to propose a date and (optional) | arrival time and location and have the service look up like | the top 5 cheapest flights or something and link to a | purchasing site (affiliate link kickbacks might be a viable | way to generate revenue here but I have effectively zero | context/experience here). | | The rest of the user story/flow (aka what happens when | someone chooses to purchase a flight from the list) is | interesting here but simpler is probably better (e.g. just | have them follow the flow in point 2 below) unless there's | some simple way for Calenday to know which flight you bought | and surface that to collaborators. | | 2. Flight coordination | | It would be nice if the trip "vanguard" or leader could put | in their flight details and have that shown with some rich | information from some flight tracker API. Might be able to | simplify the flight details input portion with some kind of | flight tracker API (e.g. Airline, flight number, date and | then it would pull the departure/boarding times, terminals, | gates, or whatever is available). | | Going a bit more democractic, and maybe what you were talking | about with showing availability, if people buy different | flights from one another (e.g. coming from diverse origins, | or differing availabilities or price sensitivities), having | an easy way to see when each collaborator/co-traveler will | land in the given destination would be very useful/cool. | toomuchtodo wrote: | This could be super profile for all sorts of event planning. Do | you plan on expanding beyond offering this for solely for trip | planning? | jaflo wrote: | I kept the website purposefully vague to just mention "planning | together" in general. I was thinking this might be helpful to | plan corporate events, but haven't really thought of many other | use cases. | | Do you have any in mind? Definitely interested to hear of any | ideas! | toomuchtodo wrote: | Drop an email in your HN profile, I'll reach out shortly. | jaflo wrote: | Just added it, looking forward to hearing from you! | pondemic wrote: | I rarely log into HN, but I just wanted to say thank you so much | for building this. I was looking for something just like it a few | months ago to plan a trip with some friends that I also wanted to | view-only share with a couple others (with a simple link - no | account requirements). I was amazed how hard it was to find | something like it and how you couldn't really do that with Google | Calendar. Don't remember exactly what the issue was with other | sites I found, but just know I will ABSOLUTELY be using Calenday | for all of my collaborative trip planning needs going forward. If | you add any other features I can't wait to see them (and if you | leave the site as is, I might be even happier in the long run). | | Best of luck! | jaflo wrote: | Thank you for the kind words! I was thinking the same thing, I | didn't really find a good solution for group trips and also | wanted something where I can send a link after the trip to | friends that wanted to go to the same place. If you recall the | issues with the other sites, do let me know! I am interested to | hear. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-18 23:00 UTC)