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Ask HN: what do you think is the best UI for setting up recurrence?

4 points by mmelin ↗ HN
Recurring tasks, reminders, emails or deliveries. Anything where you have something that should re-occur on some schedule.

What is the best UI that you've seen for configuring this?

- Free form text field, i.e. typing "every 24 hours"

- Classic form, dropdowns and radio buttons (examples would be appreciated)

- Crontab...

- Something else entirely

3 comments

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jaymon
A lot of what is "best" has to do with how specific you want to be. Appending "every" to a date is great if you want something to occur every N. But what if you want it to occur every other N? Or the first N of every M? There's a reason why things like Crontab or iCalendar's RRULE are so specific and verbose.

In order to decide what is "best" I would first decide how specific I needed to be and then start to narrow my input options based on my defined need.

mmelin
I agree. The iCalendar specification allows for some crazy complexity, but I'm not sure I've seen a UI that allows you to use every feature possible with the spec.

I'd think you could do a "discoverable" UI, where the default case is is relatively simple but you can expand recurrence options when needed.

If anyone has an example of this being implemented I would appreciate a pointer.