[amitregev]

Good day all!

After several months of ongoing development we are excited to announce today the very first public beta version of our upcoming BlackBerry application, SBSH Calendar Pro!

Since Calendar Pro is first released in public beta stages it is available for free download! All you need to download Calendar Pro is to have a registered account at our forums. Registering our forums is of course free and takes several moments. Complete download information is included at the bottom of this post. This might also be a good place to introduced Yegor, which is the project manager for Calendar Pro and will be active here on the Calendar Pro forum along with myself and the rest of our development team - reviewing your input and working together on the development of this new exciting project!

So what is Calendar Pro?

Calendar Pro offers a powerful personal information manager that replaces the built-in Calendar and Tasks applications on your BlackBerry device with a more robust time management system. Calendar Pro brings integrated display and management that allow you to manage both appointments and tasks in one solution, innovative item editing dialogs with: tab-based interface, full screen note preview, field-icons and much more!

These are only part of the things that the first public beta version brings with it. As we continue with the public beta development we plan to implement lots of additional features that will help you increase productivity and bring more value added to Calendar Pro!

The main purpose of this release first in public beta stages is to receive as much input as possible from our users and we would highly appreciate if you could post back with your experience and any feature requests for things that you would like to see implemented with upcoming public beta versions of Calendar Pro – this way helping us all design a better product as we continue to step towards a first official version release that we hope to reach within a few additional weeks of development from now.

1. Calendar Views

This first version of Calendar Pro offers 3 initial Calendar Views with it: Daily, Weekly and Monthly. Each offers an overview of a different time span with different level of focus on events, in accordance to the scope of dates presented with each of the views.

Daily view – offers a preview of your agenda per specific day, displaying all of your appointments for that specific day along with tasks due for that same day. When viewing today’s date overdue tasks will also be displayed within the Daily view. Items text color is determined based on the status of each of the items to give you easier overview, status icons indicate the status of each of your items, larger daily timeline is placed at the top of the view and much more!

Weekly View – Offers “vertical-bars” type of display with one week worth of events. Giving you an optimal solution to review a week worth of events in one view. At the top of each of the days you will find a small gray gap with red bars placed on top of it, each red bar gives indication of tasks due for that date, this way providing you an overview about your tasks for each of your week days along with the number of tasks due each day.

Similar to the Daily view you can also highlight between the different events within this view, open any of the events etc. Each of the different event bars is also colored based on the item status color.

Monthly View – A full month display of your agenda in one screen! Mini timelines are drawn within each of the different day rectangles, task symbols indicating existence of tasks for specific days and more!

* Those of you who are familiar with our Calendar solution for different platforms (Windows Mobile or S60) will notice that with this new BlackBerry implementation we no longer implemented a List view and the weekly view is now replaced with the vertical-bars display which offers a new view to track your agenda that we didn’t use with any of our other platform Calendar solutions until today. It will be great to hear your thoughts about this new view so that we will know how to plan our development of a similar view also with our other cross-platform Calendar solutions


2. Item Editors

Calendar Pro brings some great new innovations with its item editors that are designed to ship improved user experience whether you create new appointments/tasks or edit existing items. Each of the editors is divided to tabs for: description fields in the first tab, full screen note editor and last tab including recurrence information. With upcoming public beta versions plan to add a new tab to edit your categories selection for each item (once we complete addition of category colors and icons support too )

Each of the fields is marked with icons instead of full field name – this helps us create a more pleasant editor display, leaving the textual part of the editor only to the actual event content while the fields are all marked only with icons. This helps bring more information to the item editor display and create a clearer dialog overall.


3. Shortcuts

Calendar Pro brings two initial sets of navigation shortcuts that are designed to make navigation within the application easier. Using buttons 1,2 and 3 you can easily jump between different dates: previous month, today’s date and next month respectively.

Using the buttons 4, 5 and 6 you can easily switch between the different Calendar Pro views from any view you currently see, switching between the Daily, Weekly and Monthly views.


Downloading Calendar Pro

Calendar Pro can be downloaded for free for all of our forum registered members. Users who are not registered to our forums can register our forums for free by clicking here. Registering our forums should take a few moments.

We request users to register our forums in order to download Calendar Pro with the hope that this will be a good incentive or users to post back at our forums after trying Calendar Pro and give us their feedback on the first public beta, what features would they like to see and together help us push the development in the best direct possible while we will continue to introduce new public beta versions in upcoming weeks. Since our users feedback is very important to us we hope that users who will register our forums will be posting back with their experience this way Your feedback is highly important to us as part of the development process.

Click here to go to the Calendar Pro download page



Future plans and upcoming development

Calendar Pro release for BlackBerry is the start of a new project development for us and we have some really great future plans set for the development of the project ahead of us in upcoming weeks and months! We hope to receive good feedback from our users as part of the public beta activity which will help us define and continue the structuring of the application development as we continue the development process. The current initial release still miss some of the features that we plan to include for the first official version release, but those will be introduced along with the upcoming public beta releases that we will be releasing here on our forums in the next couple of weeks and months.

Both myself and Yegor are looking forward for your follow-up and feature requests on this new version and will be sure to follow-up with any of your input right away. We hope you will enjoy this first version release of Calendar Pro and invite you to stay tuned here on our forums for upcoming updates too as we continue the development.

Have a great day all!

[Prosper]

Wow, looks great!

I really dig the view's layouts - and I hope we can port this to Calendar (WM) as well (since the weekly view was suggested for Calendar WM as well - am I getting some $$ now for the weekly layout? [just kidding])..

BTW - Why is it Calendar Pro? That's kind of confusing...

[Yarns]

Congrats on the new release!

Looks like this one will bring a great new SBSH-experience to BlackBerry users

[Yarns]

- The issue with the keyboard display still is present (Storm)
- When switching between views parts of the "old" view remain in the background while the "new" one is shifted a bit to the left
- setting a task as complete is not possible for me - no reaction when tapping the status button
- would be nice if all-day-events could be shown in a different way in week-view - these long green lines seem a bit irritating (personally I prefer the "classic" week-view. The bars alone aren't really informative. You need to switch between views to get the desired information. I consider the classic view (as in the WM version) more informative).

Will continue playing through the day...

Apart from that: great working speed!!!

[amitregev]

Wow, looks great!

I really dig the view's layouts - and I hope we can port this to Calendar (WM) as well (since the weekly view was suggested for Calendar WM as well - am I getting some $$ now for the weekly layout? [just kidding])..

BTW - Why is it Calendar Pro? That's kind of confusing...

You are correct about the new Weekly view that was implemented with this new BlackBerry version This was something that was initially suggested for the Windows Mobile version and is also planned to be available on the Windows Mobile version pretty soon now ( ) but since the BlackBerry version design started long after the Windows Mobile version was already released and designed, it was much easier for us to design it with this new (and much improved IMO) Weekly view and therefore the BlackBerry users can enjoy this new view already with this early stage

You can be sure that pretty soon you will also see this new view available on the Windows Mobile version too Still not ETA, but this is in the works for sure.

@ As for the name - we might still modify this a bit, but we couldn't made up our mind what will be the proper addition to the application name for the BlackBerry version, like we have the "Calendar Touch" addition for Pocket PC devices. So if you, or anyone else, got some good addition we can place with the Calendar name instead of the current "Pro" we will be really glad to hear suggestions here. Since this is just a very initial version we are still open to make modifications to the name of the new application We have many upcoming public beta versions planned before the official release will be here and therefore there is still good time for modifications with the name of the application at this stage.

Any suggestions on this will also be very welcome

[eripmu]

This might be easy for others but not for me. I signed up and downloaded it to my desktop. It's in a zip file. Now how do I get it on my BB? Or can I do this OTA? Which would be better

[disposition]

Using BB Curve 8900

If you are in X view and attempt to select the same view, you receive: java.lang.RuntimeException: Attempt to push screen while already displayed.

Clicking ok just takes the message away and you can continue using the app.

Questions:

1. How do I complete a task?
2. Does this sync w/ Outlook?

It would be nice if the "View" was set as an Option, rather than constantly being in the menu, IMHO. It would also be nice if you were only prompted to Save, Discard or Cancel if changes were made, rather than being prompted anytime you attempt to exit a task / calendar item.

[Yegor]

Using BB Curve 8900

If you are in X view and attempt to select the same view, you receive: java.lang.RuntimeException: Attempt to push screen while already displayed.

Clicking ok just takes the message away and you can continue using the app.

Questions:

1. How do I complete a task?
2. Does this sync w/ Outlook?

It would be nice if the "View" was set as an Option, rather than constantly being in the menu, IMHO. It would also be nice if you were only prompted to Save, Discard or Cancel if changes were made, rather than being prompted anytime you attempt to exit a task / calendar item.

Hi,
1. I'll check the issue of selecting the same view.
2. To complete a task, just set its state to completed (if due date isn't set it'll be set to the date of changing the state to "completed"), change the states by pressing "space" - this will be clickable soon.
3. the synchronization is done the same way as with the default calendar (including appointments and tasks) through Desktop Manager.
4. view preference will be added to options view (development)
5. the annoying prompt is already fixed and will be available in next version.

Y.

[Mainiak Blaniak]

First off, I'd like to say I was excited when I saw the post for this application on Crackberry.com, and immediately joined your forums and downloaded the application. I am currently trying to find a replacement PIM for BB and was hoping this might be it. As of right now, definitely not, but I'm hoping with further development this might be the app to beat! I am more than willing to pay for an app like this, provided it provides the features I need and is priced competitively with similar apps.

I am running a Blackberry Pearl 8110 on AT&T, with the official AT&T 4.5 OS version.

When i attempt to add an appointment, after several character inputs in the first line of the details tab I get the following error: input system error. system being restarted. The application can be exited using the red 'end' key, but re-entering the application, it is still locked up. a device reset will clear the error, but it will return any time I attempt to enter an appointment

After initial install, I began browsing through the different views available, which in general I think are sufficient.
However, for this application to be useful for me, significant customization options for the various views would be necessary.
below is a list of areas I would like to see customizable:

All views: selectable categories for appointments and tasks; color coded. Allow the option of over-riding category color with another to indicate overdue tasks

Day view: show day of week in the banner at top of screen (i.e. Wed. Feb. 16, 2009)

Weekly view:

poor handling of all-day tasks; better option would be to include a row across the top of the calendar grid, perhaps just below the date bar, to locate all 'all-day' appointments in, rather than showing them as bar all the way down the day. also an all day apointment I had in my calendar was imported such that it crossed days. (i.e. 6pm on monday to 5:59 on tuesday)

ability to select whether the week begins on Sunday or Monday, to allow conformance to either preference or local convention.

ability to customize the time range shown in the grid (i.e. show only 8am-5pm);

add a window at the bottom of the screen that shows the time, title and location of whatever appointment is highlighted, so clicking on it is not necessary unless more detail or editing is necessary

Monthly view:

selectable week beginning day, as in weekly view

perhaps show colors based on category in the tiny bars shown in each day cell...this may make the display too cluttered

Recurrence tab:

many more options for recurrence necessary - recur based on days/weeks/months from either start date, due date, or completed date. Recur every x number of days of week (i.e. every other tuesday, every 3rd tuesday), recur every 3rd tuesday of the month. I am probably missing some of these...see DateBk6 for Palm or Pocket Informant for BB for a more complete list.

details tab:

more options for alarms: multiple days, 6 hours, 12 hours

add category selection here


Also, I'd like to see the ability to add floating and to-do's: these work by setting a due date, and once the due date is passed, the to-do remains ONLY on the current day view, until the task is marked complete.



I really like the general appearance of the application, and the tabbed layout for data entry for each task and appointment is very well implemented.


I hope this input is useful to you in further developing your application, and I look forward to testing future beta versions and hope your commercial release will meet my needs!

thanks,

mainiak Blaniak

[Ninad]

Great.

Will download this evening and check it out. But anything out of SHSH factory is on its way to success.

Will be checking this one on my Storm.

Regards,

Ninad.

[amitregev]

- The issue with the keyboard display still is present (Storm)
- When switching between views parts of the "old" view remain in the background while the "new" one is shifted a bit to the left
- setting a task as complete is not possible for me - no reaction when tapping the status button
- would be nice if all-day-events could be shown in a different way in week-view - these long green lines seem a bit irritating (personally I prefer the "classic" week-view. The bars alone aren't really informative. You need to switch between views to get the desired information. I consider the classic view (as in the WM version) more informative).

Will continue playing through the day...

Apart from that: great working speed!!!

Many thanks Matze for this initial input about this first public beta version!

@ Can you include some screen capture showing the problem when switching views that continues to show parts of the previous view for you?

@ The keyboard issue is actually a simpler compatibility flag that we forgot to activate with the installer of this first public beta and therefor on Storm devices it will automatically open the keyboard for you since we didn't include the compatibility flag as part of the installer. With the upcoming update we will have this flag properly included too so that this problem will be resolved. You can find more information how to remove the keyboard until we make this change at the following article:

http://www.blackberr...ackberry-storm/

@ As for the additional reports, we are going to get back on work right away and you can be sure some of these changes will already be included with the upcoming new update for Calendar Pro in the next couple of days now.

Cheers

[Yarns]

Will have to learn how to make screenshots, thereafter I'll post 'em.

[Ninad]

This might be easy for others but not for me. I signed up and downloaded it to my desktop. It's in a zip file. Now how do I get it on my BB? Or can I do this OTA? Which would be better

On the top of the head, I think there's a Readme.txt in the zip file.

Ninad.

[SinisterJunkie]

Installed on my Curve 8310 (OS 4.5.0.124), but get a "java.lang.NullPointerException" when I try and open the Daily, Weekly, or Monthly views. I am able to open the Search View and enter appontments that way.

[Ninad]

Installed on BB Storm. Changed "Compatibility settings" as per Amit's earlier post.

Installation went smooth. But is "non-responsive". I cannot get the Storm to select the appointments and the click on the appointments will not Open the appointment. I have also tried removing the battery and restarting, but no improvement.

Regards,

Ninad.