Peopler – Future availability

Whilst Peopler isn’t exactly being downloaded in the millions, I’ve received *actual* feedback from users, which shows they are a) using the app and b) interested enough to email me!

One feature, which I’ve wanted to add for a while, is the ability to view the future availability of your favourites. It’s all fine being able to see a person’s availability today, but what about tomorrow or the day after? To sort this, I’ve started building a Day Picker into Peopler. iOS Simulator Screen Shot 29 May 2015 12.12.03This was an early mockup I did,  so I could see how a horizontal date picker would work. I’ve seen this horizontal pickers and like the look of them. After some coding, I ended up with something like this.

iOS Simulator Screen Shot 29 May 2015 17.22.56

You can see five days in advance, scrolling right will show you up to thirty days. This is an iPhone 5 screen size and I suspect the iPhone 6 will probably show 6 or 7 days. I need to experiment with this a little to ensure the auto layout works. Anyway…I digress. You can see that I’m free for the Remainder of the day. When I select a day in the future, it goes a bit wrong 🙂

iOS Simulator Screen Shot 29 May 2015 16.59.49

My “availability” algorithm works off the current time and isn’t factoring in the fact that we’re dealing days in the future. This was actually a good thing as it made me realise that showing availability in this way is pointless for any date in the future. My initial feeling is that availability might be better expressed in number of appointments and actual free time.

I need to think on this a little as working hours will factor into this too. No point in telling you that somebody have seven hours free if that time is beween 5pm and midnight!

For the next release, version 1.2.0, I might just add the day picker into the schedule view. If you have any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them!

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