Blog

My thanksgiving vacation was spent at my parents house uploading this picture

slowinternet
Yup.

Decorative element

Introducing the Liszt Rehearsal Scheduler

I know, I said like a month ago that I was going to post sound clips of my dissertation tomorrow, and I keep not. I've been busy with planning a lecture recital and putting together what I'm about to show you.

I've talked about Hammer in some depth before, and I'm in the process of taking all those programs I've built (Hammer/Keys/DAVID/Encore/Mallet) and turning them into one big program that I can sell to people, and that big program is named Liszt. It's still being developed, but here's a part that's more or less done.

I've had to schedule a variety of rehearsals over my academic career (something that will no doubt continue), and it's been a challenge to play email tag with an ensemble basically saying “Hey when are y'all free?” So building on the calendar portions of Liszt, I built a rehearsal scheduler that takes the availability of all participants and spits out possible times. Let's see how it is in action.

Liszt (the big program) requires an account, but since the rehearsal scheduler is just a simple utility (for now), it relies on email addresses for scheduling. This means it's passwordless, but it also means that the first thing that has to be done is email validation.

Liszt1

Once the email address is validated, the user can start assembling the survey. Here, the schedule coordinator sets basic information including the title, length of meeting, and date range of meeting, along with some general information about the meeting or rehearsal.

Liszt2

Next, the coordinator adds participants, and a blank calendar is created for each.

Liszt3

Participants add their “Busy” times to the calendar.

Liszt4

Once all calendars are in, the coordinator can look at a list of possible times for meeting. By default the program looks for times between 9am and 5pm, but these thresholds can be changed to show different hours.

Liszt5

Once a time is scheduled, the program creates the appropriate Google Calendar, Outlook.com calendar, and ICS files (for Outlook and iCal), and the participants are emailed the chosen time.

Liszt7

So that's a basic overview of the Liszt Rehearsal Scheduler. It's still rough around the edges as I find all the bugs, but it's workable. And it's a glimpse into what Liszt will soon become. To give you an idea, here's what my Liszt dashboard looks like:

Liszt8

We're getting there!

Decorative element
Kyle Vanderburg