Jotcal

Why I built a calendar for the wall

Aston Gilliland · It started with a light switch that wouldn't turn off

In 2022 I made a short video that opens with me asking a voice assistant to turn off the entry light. It tells me the bookshelf light is not responding. I didn't stage that. I'd been trying to make a point about how these devices sit between us and the physical world, and the demonstration walked in on its own.

The point I was making then is the one Jotcal is built on now, so it's worth setting out properly.

Phones are a window, not a bridge

Our phones, tablets and computers connect the life we live in the physical world with the one we live in the digital world. They do an acceptable job of it. But they're more of a window into that world than something that combines the two, and I think that's why so many of these interactions feel clumsy.

Take a light switch, which I've now used as an example in about four different arguments because it keeps working. A switch is always there. It's always in the same place. It responds the instant you touch it. It's hardwired, so it doesn't depend on a network being up. And it's tactile, so you can tell whether it's on or off without looking at it, and you can operate it walking past with your hands full.

Now do the same thing from your phone. You've lost the tactility. You have to look at what you're doing. The response isn't always immediate. And sometimes it just doesn't work, because unlike the switch it isn't wired to anything.

I want to be fair about why anyone builds it that way. It isn't that developers think a phone is the right home for a light switch. It's that a multi-purpose device you already own is quick and easy to build a bridge with. It's the cheapest way to connect the two worlds, and cheap wins by default. I just think we can do better, and I don't think we have to wait for new technology to do it.

The bit I disagree with most people about

There are real efforts to fix this. Haptic controllers try to recreate touch. VR tries to recreate presence. Some of it is good, and gaming is the case where it works: a whole world is being fabricated around you anyway, one with no connection to your real surroundings, so recreating everything from scratch is the only option. You can stand in your lounge room and be climbing a sand dune. That's a fair trade.

But those solutions are trying to invent a new way to solve a problem that technology created, when the existing solution, the physical non-tech one, could just be enhanced to work with the digital world instead.

Flicking a wall switch. Turning a door handle. Touching another person. You could recreate all of it visually and physically. Would it ever be quite the same? Would it be consistent every time? Would you have to put hardware on to do it?

That's a timing argument, not a technology one. Maybe simulation gets there. I don't expect it to be practical and universal for many years, and I think most of these problems can be solved right now, with technology we already have, by designing more carefully. So I'd rather spend my effort on the enhancement than the simulation.

Which brings me to the whiteboard

A wall calendar used to be how families kept track of things. Plenty of houses still run a whiteboard for events, reminders, chores, whatever benefits from being visible to everyone.

Then all of it synced to our devices and became available everywhere we go. That's great and I wouldn't undo it. But two things got lost on the way.

The first is communal visibility. A calendar on a personal device is personal, and the collaboration that used to happen because everyone walked past the same board doesn't happen anymore.

The second is the one I care about more, because it's measurable. A whiteboard is always there and always ready. Creating an event is as simple as picking up the pen and writing it. Doing the same thing on a device means finding the device, unlocking it, opening the calendar, and then creating the event with touch buttons and a touchscreen keyboard.

Count those. One step against five. That gap is a barrier to entry, and barriers to entry decide what actually gets used. It's exactly the same failure as the light switch: the physical version is instant and always ready, and the digital version is better in every way except the one that determines whether you bother.

There are partial answers, lock screen widgets and voice-activated hubs, and they have their own compromises. Voice in particular is a good idea that keeps not working, which is where this essay came in.

Why the existing home dashboards didn't do it

I'm certainly not the first person here. Google's Home Hub, Samsung's Family Hub fridge, DAKboard, and a long tail of DIY smart mirror projects have all built a version of the household display.

Where I think they fall short is one specific thing, and it isn't the hardware. It's the interaction model. Most of them give you a window, a read-only view into your digital life. Some use voice, with mixed success. The few that take touch use it for limited things: pressing buttons, swiping between pages, maybe jotting a quick note. For anything more useful, like creating and managing your events, you're back on your phone.

That's the same word again. Window. The whole category fails for the same reason phones do, which is what convinced me it was worth building rather than buying.

What I set out to make, and what took four years

A digital wall planner you can write on with a pen, where what you write becomes a real calendar entry that syncs to everyone's phones. Roughly whiteboard-sized. Somewhere visible. Easy to read across a room and quiet enough to blend into a wall.

I started by validating rather than building, because I wanted to know whether my own family would use the thing before I put real time into it. The first prototype ran on a Surface Pro I already owned. Wrong size, caught every reflection in the room, and handled pen and touch without any work from me, which was the whole point of choosing it. I wanted a full month on screen like a paper calendar and settled for a week, because a week still gives you enough to plan against while leaving room to write.

Then it took four years, most of which was spent on things I hadn't thought about at all in 2022.

Handwriting turned out to be the hard part, and not the recognition. Recognition is mostly a solved problem you can buy. The hard part was the beat after recognition. My first version popped up a form with the title and time filled in, waiting for you to press Save. It worked perfectly and it destroyed the feeling, because a form is data entry and data entry is the thing I was trying to get away from. On a wall it's worse, since you write and walk off, and a form waiting for a second touch either doesn't get one or holds you hostage. It took a while to accept that the stroke has to be the confirmation, and that the safety net belongs after the event exists rather than before.

Low-latency ink on Boox hardware took two attempts and about six months of a confident wrong diagnosis. I'd concluded the route was closed. It wasn't, and I'd been misreading the failure the entire time.

E-ink came from a completely different direction. I'd spent a video pulling apart car dashboards, and the thing that stuck was that an LCD is lit by one backlight behind the whole panel. You can dim it. You can't turn it off. So even at night, showing a mostly black screen, it's still throwing light at you. I wrote that about instrument clusters and only later realised I'd described exactly what a tablet does when it's screwed to a kitchen wall.

And one line from that 2022 video turned out to be the whole product. I said I had an idea for the agenda view, something that mixes today's events with real time and contextual information, and that I'd get into it later. That's the surface the app is built around now. I did not appreciate at the time that it was the hard part.

What I still owe it

Jotcal doesn't do meeting invitations yet. You can see an invite and you can't respond to it. There are no travel-time reminders. There are no chores, no meal planning and no shopping lists, and those aren't coming, because it's a calendar.

The price is set where it is because of those gaps rather than as a discount, and it goes up as they close. Paying once means you get the finished thing at the price you paid.

The other half of the 2022 argument is still unbuilt too. I wanted the environment to react to you rather than you setting up the environment, and to have 80 or 90 percent of it handled without anyone touching anything. A calendar that tells you the day's shape before you ask is a start on that. It isn't the finish.

If you want to see where any of this came from, the videos are still up under meta.physical. The last one is the wall calendar, and it ends with me saying I hope to have a working prototype by the next video. There was no next video. This is it.

Jotcal on the App Store  ·  Jotcal on Google Play

Free to download, with 14 days of everything and no card.

Related