Days Until
Have you
- Forgotten your own wedding anniversary, perhaps every year since that joyous event?
- Forgotten to order presents in time for your poor, long-suffering parents on mother’s or father’s day?
- Been counting down to an imagined day in the future where you’ll stomp into your boss’s office, throw down that badge with the unflattering photo, and tell him to take this job and shove it? (well, ok, maybe it’s just a long-planned three day vacation)
And, really, one of the best uses of this for fun — building anticipation for good things and events coming in your future, like that new Movie release you’ve been waiting for.
Sound good? Here’s a widget for you.
For iGoogle users today, and hopefully other platforms soon.
Notes on the “Days Until” widget
- Nov 6, 2007 Small updates this month and last to fix bugs and refine some features.
- Set the future date, by changing the Year, Month, and Day fields, which are displayed in that order. (And are pre-populated with today’s date). I tried to avoid things that required special date handling for different parts of the world, and settled on this simple trick, with no text.
- Hit the
delete button to remove a reminder - Annual recurrence is handled automatically for you. However, other types of recurrence (monthly, irregular) are not supported.
- Compared to Caleb’s existing countdown widget, some pros of Days Until are 1) Quicker to add/remove counters 2) Many counters per widget and some cons are 1) Smaller size of countdown timers (big timers for big events is kinda nice) 2) Only recalculates the countdown when you refresh the page (to make the widget simpler & less load on your browser)
- The code for Days Until is hosted at Google. The code is available under the permissive MIT license. Hopefully this will enable others to port it to other widget platforms, like Netvibes UWA, Pageflakes, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.
- It stores your reminders in the preferences for the widget itself (using JSON serialization). So there’s no accounts to sign up for, no servers which can get overloaded or go down (other than Google’s), and no way for other people to see your reminders. The code is all Javascript running in your own browser. The only downside is if you delete the widget from your page, you’ll also lose your reminders.
- Uses the simple, ever-useful, and free two-tone icon library
- Curious about how this kind of widget gets developed? Subscribe to blog posts here, or look in comments below for follow-up postings on news related to the Days Since widget.
- Feedback and feature requests are welcome. And if you have new, interesting uses for this, please let others know.
- Want reminders that recur frequently, but aren’t tied to a specific date? (hey, when did you last water that plant?!) Take a look at Days Until’s sister widget, named Days Since.
Spread the word
“Days Until” Google Gadget « Kick My ADD wrote:
[...] Posted in ADHD, Tools at 9:18 am by bloggingawayadhd For anyone that found the “Days Since” iGoogle Gadget useful, you may also like the new sister gadget: “Days Until“. [...]
Posted on 19-Jun-07 at 2:21 am | Permalink
Jack wrote:
I love this gadget. My 5 year old is always asking “How many days until…”. Now I have a quick answer, and they are all on the same gadget.
I do have one question, is it possible to sort in order of the next scheduleed event?
Thanks!
Posted on 29-Jun-07 at 8:19 am | Permalink
Bernie Thompson wrote:
Hi Jack — My kids love it for the same reason! (their own birthdays, of course, being the big one).
The sorting should, in fact, be by what events are coming up next (sort by days until, ascending). Is that not working for you?
Posted on 29-Jun-07 at 8:31 am | Permalink
Beth wrote:
I’m having trouble saving my dates. Is there a limit to how many dates I can save?
Posted on 12-Jul-07 at 7:07 pm | Permalink
Bernie Thompson wrote:
Hi Beth,
The limit depends on browser. With Firefox (2.0.0.5), I can get a few dozen reminders in there before it overflows and craps out. It’s based on the limit each browser has on the URL line, and in theory some browsers have a limit of 2048 for the whole URL, so the reminders text & dates (stored in a JSON string) would have a bit less than that.
Let me know if any browsers are particularly bad, and try Firefox or IE 7 if you haven’t. Thanks!
Posted on 19-Jul-07 at 6:37 pm | Permalink
Daniel wrote:
Loving this tool.
However, living in the UK, our dates are structured dd/mm/yyyy.
A setting to change this would be lovely!
Posted on 21-Aug-07 at 3:43 am | Permalink
Bernie Thompson wrote:
Hi Daniel - The hope is to save that complexity of having the locale set by how the widget pre-populates with today’s date (which lets you easily see which is year, month, or day). I understand the desire 00 our dates are also commonly formatted differently in the US. Best wishes!
Posted on 24-Aug-07 at 2:17 pm | Permalink
Kuo wrote:
Hi! I love your work very much. I recommended it to almost all of my friends.
By the way, is it possible to add an function to show the events’ dates if necessary.
Sometimes, we forgot the events dates (especially for some long-term events) after adding it. For example in my list. There are 309 days remained for one of my planned trip but I already forgot what date is it.
It will be much better if the event dates can be shown/checked if needed. Of course, the dates can be invisible in normal times.
Sorry for my bad English.
Posted on 27-Aug-07 at 7:52 am | Permalink
Bernie Thompson wrote:
Hi Kuo — That’s an excellent suggestion. I’ll look at displaying a tooltip with the date, when there’s a mouseover the reminder.
Posted on 27-Aug-07 at 6:44 pm | Permalink
Kuo wrote:
I found a problem to the reminder limit. To confirm that, I did a small test as the following:
1. I added reminders one by one. It seems to be O.K. when the reminders number
Posted on 30-Aug-07 at 10:28 am | Permalink
Brett wrote:
Very Cool. I would love to have the same thing on my http://www.netvibes.com start page.
Posted on 07-Sep-07 at 2:09 pm | Permalink
Kuo wrote:
I tested times. The same mistake I reported on 30-Aug-07 appeared everytime when the total items reached more than about 20 (I use chinese).
Posted on 24-Sep-07 at 8:24 am | Permalink
Kuo wrote:
As I said, a mailfunction would appear when I added more than 20 items into the Day Until gadget.
Currently I use two ways to avoid the mistake : (1)I added one more Day Until in same tag so that I have 40 items quota in a iGoogle tag, or (2) added
Day Since (it is another useful tool similar to Day Until).
I want to say again: This gadget is very
useful! Thanks!
Posted on 24-Sep-07 at 8:53 pm | Permalink
Bernie Thompson wrote:
Hi Kuo - thanks so much for your updates! Which browser and version are you using, where you hit the 20 item limit? IE should have a limit of 2000 or so characters for the JSON string, and FireFox around 4000 or so.
Plus there is the currently unresolved issue of Google’s limit on their side (which seems to be based on a limit across all widgets on your google.com/ig page.)
I’ve been leaving the widgets alone for the last few months, but will make an update soon. Thanks again for all your feedback!
Posted on 25-Sep-07 at 11:52 am | Permalink
Kuo wrote:
I just tested it again. Wonderful! it work very well even more than 20 items were added.
Maybe the malfunction I encountered was caused by the google side. Generally I use Firefox. Yes, I did test it using IE when the malfunction appearing. IE also showed the same mistake. So, I didn’t think it a problem of browers.
I’ll let you know if the error appears again. Thanks for your wonderful gedgets again!
Posted on 26-Sep-07 at 11:19 am | Permalink
Sorting and Highlighting added to Days Since iGoogle Gadget | Leancode wrote:
[...] Google’s caches update, the new Days Since will reach you. A port of similar updates to Days Until and Feedsparks will be coming. If you see any problems or have any other ideas, feedback is [...]
Posted on 11-Oct-07 at 1:04 pm | Permalink
Days Until Updated | Leancode wrote:
[...] Days Until has been updated with some of the same better error handling, zebra table, and other features of yesterday’s Days Since update. Current users will automatically get the upgrade over the next few hours (as caches expire). If you see any problems, please comment here! [...]
Posted on 13-Oct-07 at 10:57 am | Permalink
Rick Cory wrote:
Brand new to igoogle and this exactly what we were looking for. Not sure I understand how annually recurring dates are reset. Maybe if you put in a symbol for recurring, i.e. 0000. How about something that tells me how hold the kids, and others, are on their birthdays? Keep up the strong work. Thanks, Rick
Posted on 18-Jan-08 at 8:45 pm | Permalink
Kristy wrote:
Love the widget, really helps in keeping the events in check. Could the developer please send the codes to my email. Thanks.
Posted on 31-Jan-08 at 5:09 am | Permalink
Miley wrote:
I LOVE this gadget! It’s the best. I never could forget annother special event!!!!!!!
Posted on 17-Feb-08 at 3:55 pm | Permalink