There are a lot of people living in places where the calendar week starts on Monday.

While I recognize that 37s at this time is not willing to add an option to let the week in the Backpack calendar start on Monday (which I heavily suggest), could you please at least add a visual indication that the day is a weekend day – like some shades of grey for Saturday and Sunday?

It would make the calendar so much easier to read for those people living in countries where the week starts on Monday.

Please.

—
Alex

This would be so much better.
I use the backpack calendar every day and it is visually different than ALL the other calendars I see here in Belgium.

Hi,

This argument raged last year for all 37S applications and the end result was that most of their clients are in the US so US style calendars are used. Personally in the UK it drives me made as I have to switch between Sun and Mon visually for the many calendars I use. The US guys have the same argument though.

An option for start day would be great but not likely though your shaded idea could improve things.

I hope the developers will hear our supplications. It’s really inconvenient to work with another weekday system. It seems to me it is simple for realizing.

If 37s could just simply add the option of eliminatiing weekends from the calendar, it would sovle this problem as well as multi-day events that are work related (i.e, M-F) than span weekend days where no one is in the office. A simple setting to toggle weekend on and off would end this discussion and make everyone happy.

Not really. If you use BP as your personal organizer, you need to see the weekends as well.

AFAIR, nobody from outside the US ever suggested a mandatory week start on monday for everyone. We only want this as an option. I fail to understand the oppostition to that.

My suggestion in the original post is the absolute minimum to make the calendar usable here. I’m amazed that Americans seem unable to understand that.

I still hope that the next revamp of the calendar will include an improvement.

That the calendar doesn’t allow you to set Monday as the first day of the week really needs to be pointed out in the FAQ for Backpack. It’s not clear in the demo nor the screenshots. People will spend money and be disappointed.

I have a hard time calling this a feature-request. It’s not added bells and whistles, like what color the header should be. It’s not clutter. It’s a standard for calendars. Most of Europe and large parts of Asia have Monday as the first day of the week.

To quote Wikipedia:
“The ISO prescribes Monday as the first day of the week with ISO-8601 for software date formats.”

If the motivation for not adding the option is that most of your customers are Americans; that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. How will that situation ever change if you can’t accommodate international users?

Schedules, vacations, numbered weeks all start on mondays and end on sundays in these regions. Yes, it might only mean a distorted visual que now and again, but it might also break Reminders in some cases (What use is a reminder if it’s a day early?)

I realize that this might be a lot of work under the hood. It doesn’t require fixing tomorrow. The calendar today isn’t “broken” because of this. It’s just unused.

Like alxwz, I hope this gets added in the future. Until then, I’m having a hard time motivating using a calendar that visually breaks with every other calendar I use and a life-time of usage habits. It’s a real shame, since BP is such a great product in every other respect.

[Edited the post to remove some unneeded hostility and make it more coherent]

Don’t get me started…

I’ve just recently had an issue with a date being entered into the Backpack calendar as 11/03/08. Rather than being set for the 11th March, it was set for 3rd November.

Possibility of event being missed = no longer use Backpack Calendar = diminishing viability of BP as a business tool

Now that backpack is being pitched as an intranet i.e. a business tool, the is more strength with the argument that weekends should not be shown. I have a business and personal account though and need to see weekends in one and not the other. maybe a toggle on/off for viewing weekends would work?

This is the reason why I just use a free account, why pay for the calendar when it is annoying to use.

+1 for

• Enabling non-us date formats (11/7 = 11th july for EU for example))
• either a shading for the weekends or option to start on monday

I have no problem with options. But it would need to be just that – an option. The week I follow starts on Sunday, and always will. I also work Sundays, and my “weekend” is Friday/Saturday. It would be really annoying if one of my work days was shaded…

Chemnitz, don’t you think that your use case (Sunday being a work day) is unusual even for American circumstances?

As for non-US date formats, it would be better to further distinguish them by not using slashes as separators (I don’t know about other countries, but here in Germany, we use dots as separators, e.g. 31.5.2008 for May 31, 2008).

I have all online and digital calendars set up with Monday as the first day of the week, and I AM in the USA!

I personally have never understood why anyone here is the USA would prefer seeing Sunday as the start of the week. For the overwhelming majority of workers in the US, the term “weekend” refers to Saturday and Sunday. There is no industry here that I can think of that starts their work week on Sunday! Sure, there are companies all over the world that operate seven days a week and have many different shifts running at any given time, but the normal work week in the US starts on Monday, just like the rest of the world!

I have no idea who initially placed Sunday as the first day of the week. If I had to guess, I would say that it is probably a religious holdover from our country’s forefathers, as the US was founded mostly because of the concept of religious freedom, and Sunday is the traditional day of worship here.

But I don’t believe that many people here at all actually consider Sunday to be the start of the week! More of a habit probably.

I would much prefer the ability to make Monday the first day, as I do with all other calendars I use! Can’t be that tough for 37 Signals to make it user-configurable.

Jim

alxwz:
No, lots of people work on Sundays.

I concur with Chemnitz, we were not in the US, or Europe, and Friday / Saturday is the official weekend

I fail to understand PeterP’s post, but

@ Chemnitz:
I used to work on Sundays a lot (as part of an ambulance), but I would never have considered that “normal” or expected to have a calendar modeled after that.

Anyway, I’d even consider different coloured heading for SA/SU an improvement. Anything that makes it stand out.
And nobody ever wanted anything but an option to make Monday the week start.

@alxwz: 1) For a lot of people, working on Sunday is normal – or at least not abnormal. As you mentioned, ambulances, and following the same line, police, hospitals, and then restaurants, retail, sports, churches – for many of these, Sunday is not an “off day” at all. 2) Sunday as the first day of week is the US standard for calendars. 3) For Christians and Jews, Sunday as the first day of the week is intrinsic to their belief.

But like you, I’ve never minded it being an option.

Cheers!