Fullscreen Calendar

Our new app, Week Calendar for iPhone, has been approved by Apple and is now available in the App Store. Immediately at the day of availability, we received valuable feedback from our first customers: they all have been missing the concept of a week view of their calendars on the iPhone, and Week Cal proved to be missing link for them!

 A lot of people also e-mailed us very good feedback on how they think Week Cal could be improved. The suggestion we got the most was a fullscreen option.

While a fullscreen mode is not really difficult to code, designing it is. Our first idea was to use a fullscreen button, like this:

fullscreen button in another app

However,  adding another button wasn't really satisfying. Furthermore, we anticipated most users would want to work in fullscreen mode all the time, and accessing the toolbars would require the user to get out of fullscreen mode, hit a toolbar button and go back in fullscreen mode. Not very optimal.

After some more thinking, we came up with the following elegant solution:

Hiding bars in Week Calendar 1.1

The top and bottom bar will be translucent and will automatically hide after a while. If you need them, just tap the screen once and they will quickly become visible; to dismiss the bars again, wait for a while or simply tap the screen again. This is exactly how the hiding bars in the iPhone's Photo app are working.

We think this solution is just perfect:

• you are always in fullscreen mode with the best possible screen usage
  
• users are familiar with the concept of the hiding bars, since it's used in other apps also
  
• it works like expected: tap anywhere to show the bars for a while or hide them again
  
• it's also smart: when you select an event, only the bottom bar will become visible so you have direct access to the toolbar items

Of course, for people who prefer not to have any hiding bars, we have added an option to disable them.