Date selection in GEE

Below you will see an image of approximately what the new calendar widget should look like. The illustration shows the process of selecting a particular date and how the calendar should behave while this is happening.

Why did I choose to do it this way?

Good question. I have to thank Alan Cooper for this for the most part, but here's the explanation. In the non-digital world, calendars are made of paper and are usually divided into a one-month-per-page format. This makes sense because of the size of paper, files, briefcases, and desk drawers. Computers, however, are easily able to display more than one month at a time, yet most visual representations of calendars are displayed in monthly chunks. Why? Because people are stupid. Not really- this mechanical age calendar is so familiar to us that most designers simply copy it and think of calendars as canonical objects that cannot be changed.

On a computer, the calendar can easily be made into a continuously scrolling sequence of days, weeks, and months. Scrolling is a very familiar concept to computer users, making this type of calendar easy to learn to use.

Now that you agree, here are the details.

This is the calendar that will appear when a user decides to change the date criteria for events displayed on the map. The calendar represents an entire year, which can be changed by clicking on the forward or back buttons located on either side of the currently displayed year at the top. I think these forward and back buttons should accelerate so that if someone wants a nice vintage earthquake, they can get there quickly without having to click click click themselves to insanity. The year the user is currently on is also indicated at the top left beside the days of the week. All 12 months are viewed by scrolling and they are to alternate in color so that the user can easily tell when one month ends and the next begins.

When a user mouses over dates, those particular date boxes will become slightly beveled, indicating that they are clickable (seen in the illustration above. No, not the one with the koala). When the user clicks, the date box beveling changes so that it looks like a depressed button. When the mouse button is released, the date has been selected and this is indicated by a red circle that appears inside the date box. This all happens right before the calendar dispappears because the user is done selecting the date! If they come back to change the date again, the last date selected will still be there, circled in red, like a comforting beacon of stability in an ever changing world.

Oh and the calendar window is scalable because- hey, I like giving people options. This is not a priority, just a classy touch.