More information needed on schedule page

[bcpierce00]

The schedule page doesn't work very well yet -- honestly, I found myself looking elsewhere (Researchr, etc.) to check things in the schedule. At a minumum, it needs to

• automatically scroll the display to keep "now" close to the left of the screen (or wherever the user has put it) unless I've explicitly scrolled the screen so that Now is not visible any more - be more careful of vertical space so that more tracks fit on the screen at once
• display the date and timezone along with the times in the "ruler" bars
• pop up talk details on mouse hover, without clicking (and clicking should make them persistent) -- in fact, maybe hovering on a talk could pop up a magnified timeline showing that talk and the ones before and after, and moving the mouse on the magnified timeline would scroll it (I know, now we're getting pretty fancy -- just speculating!)

Ed:

• The schedule sucks. We'll rebuild it. It won't use horizontal scrolling in the future -- it's a design and accessibility nightmare (accessibility standards actually ban horizontal scrolling almost outright).

[EdNutting]

The schedule has been rotated to be vertical now, which helps a little bit (and results in the browser being able to restore the scroll position, and for low-parallelism schedules requires little/no horizontal scrolling).

I'd still like to find time to investigate schedule views and rebuild this. We'll need to for larger future conferences where parallel sessions presents a big UI challenge.

[rossng]

I've split out individual issues from this meta-issue. I haven't created anything for this part, as it's not yet clear (to me, at least) what is being proposed:

in fact, maybe hovering on a talk could pop up a magnified timeline showing that talk and the ones before and after, and moving the mouse on the magnified timeline would scroll it (I know, now we're getting pretty fancy -- just speculating!)

However, this would be a good thing to use GitHub Discussions for. If we settle on a design, we can turn it into an issue.

[bcpierce00]

Is there a discussion already for this? I think doing something in this space would improve the schedule a lot.

The idea is: The schedule design is subject to a tension between (1) wanting to display a lot of information that may be useful to people and (2) wanting to keep the page from getting too cluttered (and the fonts getting too small!). The suggested approach is to let people hover on specific items in the schedule to get more information quickly.

More ambitiously, if the displayed information includes not just the talk that we're hovering over but also the previous and following talks, then one could sort of sweep across the schedule to see a scrolling timeline of "higher-resolution" displays of each program item. But this is just a refinement -- "hover for more info and then sweep to see more info for the next item" would be almost as good.

[rossng]

There is no discussion yet, but feel free to create one 🙂

[bcpierce00]

I propose implementing "hover over schedule for full information on event" as the thing we should implement for now. Further discussion probably not needed for now.