Improving date selection in timeline

First of all: Thank you for this marvelous software!

For the date selection on the timeline view I would have some suggestions for some small adjustments that would IMHO increase the user-friendliness:

  • date format of the date pickers: Currently it is always set to mm/dd/yyyy, which is used predominately in the US, Canada and some African countries. Having a setting here would be great.
  • You can currently select the first day of the week in the setting, however it is not reflected in the date picker. It’s a bit irritating starting the week on Monday but having to look in the second column.
  • As I mostly use it for filling up the timesheet at my company, a left/right-arrow-buttons would be helpful, that will switch both date input fields by a single day, back or forth, and apply the selection immediately. This way you can easily jump a day back and forth.

Edit: after looking at the code, I’ve seen, that the default <input type="date"/>-field is used. This uses the locale of the browser. Unfortunately (at least in Chrome), regardless of if the locale is English (United States) or just plain English, the displayed date format is always mm/dd/yyyy and also the first day of the week depends on this. So the first two suggestions are not doable with this.

I also use the timeline view for filling out my timesheet. I normally just grab like a week of days then scroll though them until I reach the end. I do really like having quick forward and back buttons though so that I can just grab a day then go forwards and backwards that way.

Something to be considered as well (or would be resolved if we had the buttons described): Switch to yesterday easily

Another thing that would improve handling: If you entered a period and would like to switch back to today (or just clear the entered period), you have to enter both date fields and delete each one, followed by a click on 12/24 hours and/or the Apply-button. A “Today”-button that clears out both fields and shows the events of the current day would be helpful as well.

Yes, that would be good, too.

image

I worked on a potential solution to this. I added a shift date option. You can select today then you can shift forwards or backwards by 1 day or 1 week. It uses the show from/to boxes, so you can even set the date there and shift both the start and end dates by 1 or 7 days. I think I might try to submit this as a PR soon.

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Wow, that looks great! This would be super helpful, at least for me (and some others as well ;-)). Thank you, @RTnhN, eagerly awaiting your PR.

Yep, I thought it would be helpful for a lot of people who use it for filling out work hours.

The PR is here: feat: add quick shift buttons to timeline and autocomplete end date from start by RTnhN · Pull Request #649 · ActivityWatch/aw-webui · GitHub

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Damn this is really good. Can’t wait for this.