Hello ProductHunt! I'm Kyle, the creator and developer of Horizon. With @alexgriendling putting time into it in between freelance projects, and me scrounging for time to code in between college applications, Horizon truly is a labor of love, taking over a year to finish.
The basic idea is to combine the weather with your calendar, but we think Horizon is much more than that.
We wanted to create something that kept you out of the app as much as possible, but was still a joy to use. And in that process we realized that planning is really hard from your iPhone, so we had to figure out ways to ease that process. That's where weather integration, Smart Search, and natural language event creation came from.
Horizon 3 takes a different approach to mobile calendaring, and we'd love to hear what you think and discuss in the comments! :)
This might be my favorite approach to a mobile calendar, it feels like thought went into every pixel.
Natural language interfacing is the killer feature for me and it will make or brake the app. What was the biggest problem you guys ran into when adding a natural language interface?
Which feature are you most proud of?
@jackrometty Wow, thanks for the praise!
The natural language processing was an interesting challenge for this update. You see, we already had a natural language engine built in Objective-C from the previous version of Horizon that we've continued to use for event creation in Horizon 3. But for search, we wanted to take advantage of Swift (the app is written in Swift, btw) and create something with a functional perspective. The library we created, ParseX, is a parser combinator library that uses regular expressions. Swift allowed us to do a lot of things that we couldn't in the Objective-C version, and so Smart Search was much easier to modify and build upon once we had made ParseX. Eventually, we hope to convert the event creation NLP engine to use ParseX, as it will be much cleaner and easier to extend functionality. We will be open sourcing ParseX in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for that :)
Well, as you can probably tell from above, I am most proud of Smart Search. I think its one of our most unique features, and proved a fun/difficult developing challenge for me. In addition to that, I couldn't be more proud of the work that @alexgriendling did on the design. Like you said, thought really did go into every pixel, and Alex did an amazing job, especially considering that this is the first iOS app he's ever designed!
@thomasmeagher Sunrise is a great app, and I really respect what @jeremylv and his team are doing right now. What I love about the App Store is that there is definitely room for multiple Calendar apps. Everybody has different tastes in terms of how they like their schedule served to them :)
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This is really pretty, and the NLP is definitely the #1 feature that sets it apart. A few questions:
1. What happened to Horizons 1 and 2? Where did you hide the bodies?
2. I think it's an interesting design decision that you allow the month view to scroll to past months, but not the day view to scroll to past days. Maybe make this consistent? Peek Calendar has a pretty cool approach.
3. The add-event-slide-transition is really dope. And the way you display ads is tasteful, thanks for that. This isn't a question.
@bryantpeng
1. The original Horizon Calendar (versions 1 and 2) is removed from sale. Everybody who had it downloaded can continue to use it, but it won't show up in the App Store anymore. We thought this was a good solution that won't upset or mislead anybody.
2. Hm, this is a good point. We should revisit that option for some more consistency.
3. :) We wanted to display Ads in the app so that people could download it for free, but we just couldn't stand generic, ugly, ads. I'm really happy with the way these ones turned out.
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