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Calendar

Prologue
This is a recurrently asked feature in the wish-list forum. Although I prefer Opera to focus especially in web browsing, I think this is not a very complicated feature to implement (at least its basic functions).
This said, there are a few things I’d use if Opera implemented a calendar. I'll try to make a quick overview of those, keeping in mind that, if I don’t talk about advanced functions, is because I don’t think they should be a priority, at least for now.
I'd like the calendar to be tightly integrated with other Opera features. Since that has implications in those features, I think the calendar should follow the mail client's philosophy: you only see it if you want to.


Three detail levels
This is a somewhat common layout. Those levels would be:

• Months at the top. The user can browse through the months and select a specific day.
  
• Days in the middle. This would give an overview of the tasks in the selected day. The user can select specific tasks.
  
• Tasks at the bottom. The user could view and edit all the information about the selected task.
  

View as panel or window
I believe the better place to implement this feature is in a panel. This panel, like most others, should be expandable into a full window. The window would have more detail at any one time (like multiple months visible at the same time, or more information about the tasks in the day view).


Multiple calendars / views
Besides the ability to have calendar for each user in multi-user mode, it could be a good idea to allow more than one calendar. For example, I'd like to have a "personal" calendar and a "work" calendar. This could be done in two ways (at least):

• Allow users to create different calendars
  
• Allow one calendar, but tag events, using filters to see, for example, only work related events.
  

General options
The user should be able to configure several general options of the calendar. Some I can think of right now:

• Week start (Monday/Sunday)
  
• Working hours
  
• Timezone
  
• Day colours (e.g. weekends in a different colour)
  
• Define special days or periods (e.g. define vacations). Defining holidays is another example, but it would also be nice to have the possibility to specify a country/state/city and have the holidays fetched automatically.
  

Events / tasks
This is probably the most important feature in this kind of calendars. I'd like to be able to set events and tasks in the calendar, in order to have, especially, a daily overview every morning. Each event or task should be defined be some parameters (E=events; T=tasks):

• (ET) Name
  
• (ET) Description
  
• (ET) Begin time/date
  
• (ET) End time/date (and/or duration)
  
• (ET) Due time/date
  
• (ET) Location
  
• (ET) Participants
  
• (ET) Type or category (for filtering and formatting)
  
• (ET) Notes
  
• (ET) Repeating period (every day / every Monday / every first Sunday of the month / …)
  
• (ET) Priority
  
• (ET) Status (done/not done)
  

Groups of events and tasks
If, when the event and task handling is done, the developers still have some time , it would be nice to have some "logic". I'm thinking of two different things:

• Previous / next task – To create sequences of tasks
  
• Main event / child events – For example, the "make dinner" event, could have sub-events like "buy the grocery" or "turn on the oven". Same for tasks.
  

Integration with other Opera features
Many people disagree with the introduction of a calendar in Opera because it's not really Internet related. Although I agree that this is usually true, I think that a calendar in Opera could be integrated with other features, which would substantially increase its usefulness and make it easier to use. I'm thinking especially in connecting the events and tasks with other parts of Opera. Some of the “connections” with other features could be:

• Contacts – You could drag contacts to events. This is an easy way to add participants to a meeting, or stakeholders to a task.
  
• Mails (and newsfeeds) – You could associate sent and received mails to a particular event or task. Another interesting feature would be, in the calendar view, the possibility to view all the mails sent or received in a particular day/week/month.
  
• Notes – This could serve a variety of purposes. We could associate Opera's notes to events, tasks or dates/hours.
  
• Links and bookmarks – If I'm seeing a particular event or task, I'd like to have all the related links easily accessible.
  

Attach files to events
An extension to the previous point. Not really integrating with Opera, but with the OS.


Alerts
This is another very common feature in web calendars. Opera could alert the user at specific times (user defined). The advantage of integrating a calendar would be that the alerts could be made through the notification system. A warning in the panel button would also be helpful (just like the mail button when we got new mail).


Automatic actions
This is not a very important feature to me, but it could be interesting. Opera could automatically perform tasks at specific times. This would require a set of instructions to be added (maybe they could also be used in buttons and menus). Here are some examples:

• Check a specific newsfeed
  
• Check a specific mail account
  
• Send a specific mail
  
• Refresh a specific webpage
  
• Start/stop a download
  
• Close Opera
  

Import / Export
This would be important for people to make the change from their current one. Opera should be able to import calendars from most major applications and export them, not only to the same applications, but also to some widely spread formats (txt, html, csv, pdf, …)


Sharing options
This would be an extension of the previous point. If an Opera user wants to share, for example, an event with another user, he should be able to do so easily. If the user selected a "share event" option, he should be able to send that event to a particular contact(s). When he receives that event (by mail, for example) he could just click it and it would be inserted in his own calendar.


Searches and filters
With all of these features implemented a good search function could be useful. It could be a normal search (although with some advanced features, that would allow searches like "April events where John Doe was one of the participants", but it could also be "embedded" in other features. For example, if we right-clicked a contact, we could have an option to view all the events where he participated. Same for mails, bookmarks...


Synchronization
With mobile devices, especially. Not much to say here