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up vote 17 down vote favorite

I have created a custom View to display a Calendar in Android.

The display is always 1 month. I'm using a swipe to the sides to switch months. Now I have seen some other Apps (including the installed stock Calendar from Google) that change to the next month by swiping down.

Is there a reason why they use this instead of to the sides? which one is more intuitive for the user? I personally like the one to the sides much more but was kinda confused that even the Google calendar uses up/down.

This is the kind of View im talking about: enter image description here

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I turned your title into a question; hope I've accurately captured the essence of your question. Feel free to revert or change if not. – dhmholley Sep 5 '12 at 15:55
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Is there any reason not to support changing the month with both types of swipe? – Dan Neely Sep 5 '12 at 17:31

2 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

With the google calendar on android, you can scroll down from one month to the next and view a whole month - but here's the key: - it's seamlessly attached top and bottom to the previous and next month without having to think about overlapping parts of the week, or having gaps, or having repeated parts of the week, or greying out days that do not belong to the month which is supposed to be displayed.

In effect, it is a stream of data rather than explicitly chunked into one month or another.

And that for me is a compelling reason to go from month to month vertically rather than horizontally - because my life is not split up month by month - I work Monday to Friday and then there's the weekends. I shouldn't need to be concerned with months breaking midweek.

Example from my phone:

enter image description here

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Ok, now where is the google calendar on my Android phone? I would dearly love to use it instead of the app that Samsung seems to think I need... – Marjan Venema Sep 5 '12 at 17:35
@MarjanVenema This isn't to defend Samsung, but their calendar app does something similar - if you tap on a day of the week outside the currently-viewed month, it does a vertical scroll to that month. 'Course, that doesn't help when the month starts on Sunday or ends on Saturday... – Izkata Sep 5 '12 at 18:08
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+1 for "because my life is not split up month by month [...] I shouldn't need to be concerned with months breaking midweek" – Joe Masilotti Sep 5 '12 at 18:51
up vote 6 down vote

I've seen it both ways. One argument in support of swiping/scrolling vertically between months is that, because of the way dates are listed in columns according to the day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday etc.), being able to simply follow that column down from month to month is slightly less disorientating that scrolling horizontally and then finding your place again.

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