Calendar : Usability improvements in Vista

The Vista calendar has some very simple yet effective changes that has a remarkable usability impact. While the calendar seems like a insignificant area to worry about usability, the changes talk about (1) the premium entry point the calendar enjoys on the visual real estate (2) MS program managers watching users (or probably themselves) struggling with the older UX - unchanged since Windows 3.1

Before: XP calendar

After : Vista Calendar

First and foremost, you need a single click to invoke the calendar as against the double in XP.

In Vista, the OK/Cancel button cluster has been done away allowing the screen to be dispatched by simply clicking outside. This has been made possible by seperating the oft-used browse calendar scenanrio from the rarely-used change date funtionality. It also prevents the accidental date changes.

In XP, the simple task of looking at the previous/next month required a combo to be dropped down. Selecting a year required the usage of a spinner control. Obviously selecting a different month in another year was a pain. In Vista, the back/forward buttons on either side of the month-year label make sequential browsing easy. Clicking the month and year label "zooms" the calendar out to show an entire year and subsequent clicks show a dacade and a century. Neat.

Even neater, if you look carefully at the calendar in Vista, you will see grey colored dates before the first and after the last date of the current month. That is what you see in all paper caledars and provides visual continuity. This space has been careless wasted in XP.

In Vista, I like the visible extra week of the next month. I wish they has done this on both side of the month or better still, allowed me to see multiple months at a glance

Vista allows you to display upto three clocks simultaneously - a handy feature in this age of geographically seperated virtual teams.

Then, there are some missing low hanging features I wish the calendar had. LIke

• Simple calculators for counting elapsed/working days between two dates, date four weeks from now etc OR extensibility to build and add such calculators
  
• Holidays being displayed in red - like a paper calendar
  
• Integration with PIMs like Outlook or other web schedulers to show free-open days
  
  
• a 'memory' for the 'Change timezone' combo box that has over 25 entries box, remembering my last few selections. A la the font tool on the office ribbon

And then surprisingly there is a badly painted 'Change date and time' dialog box ! As if somebody threw it together and then forgot to fix it.

Don't see it? Then it doesn't matter to you anyways :)