[HN Gopher] Show HN: Calenday, real-time collaborative calendars...
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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.
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