Round Calendar

Several years ago, on a sunny autumnal day, I found myself waiting for my plane in the lounge of "Ellinikon", the Athens' airport. I was flying to Leros where I was serving my military duty for the Greek Navy. And as every other sailor or soldier, I was counting my days until my discharge and the return to normal civilian life.

It must have been late October 1998 when I had this idea of writing a program that represents a calendar year in a circular fashion. You see, when I was really young, at primary school, we used to have in my classroom a big poster hanging up the wall that illustrated the months and the seasons of a year. As a circle. Along with vegetables, fruit, weather and whatever else you may think of. Grapes in August, snow in January, yellow leaves for October and strawberries for May... Every month, a perfect 30 degree circular sector.

I realised that I had always had that vision of the calendar months in a year going circular, clock-wise in a big big circle. As if it was imprinted on the back of my head. Do you ever get this feeling, do you ever visualise space or time in a similar way?

That very morning I decided to write a piece of software to do exactly that! Draw a calendar as a circular disk (http://www.cylog.org/graphics_1.asp). It came with a PhotoShop-like toolbar and used to save the calendars as *.bmp files or Adobe Illustrator (*.ai) vector graphics files. I remember I used to have the bitmap as a background as I was counting down my days in the Navy...

Very recently, I got an email from a guy asking me whether I was still maintaining it. I replied that I wasn't but would be interesting in picking it up again and he replied back to give me suggestions on enhancements. I remember a while ago I had another email from somobdy who was offering help in building an online-help system for RoundCal. Because of course, the original version never had any documentation :-). I also did a quick search on my email archives and I came across various comments from people who got interested in it and wanted to drop me a line or ask a question.

As I am writing these lines I have a feeling that I'll get back to it very soon. I just need to find the time to do it. I have already thought of how I am going to write it from scratch, how the calendar window is going to work and how the XML configuration will be utilised.

If you read this and would like to make any suggestions, please don't hesitate to contact me (http://www.cylog.org/contactus.asp). I'll do my best!

Comments

tsonix said…
Round Calendar!

I would get the most outrageous comments from colleagues looking at my print-outs.

You see... I never ever printed a year-long round calendar. I was always printing 3 or 4 months, so the graphic would never be circular, but would always resemble an ancient Greek amphitheatre.

Therefore most of my Greek colleagues would guess that it was the Greek parliament seating diagram! (And what would I be using it for, exactly?)

British colleagues on the other hand would just look at it and have absolutely no idea what it was all about. Much like the photograph I had of Nick Galis against Bob McAdoo

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