qiyuxuan96

Hey HN!

We built a chrome extension that lets you load your calendar from any website quickly without switching context (i.e. switch to another tab or app).

I personally have a busy calendar, and didn't like jumping in and out of GCal 30 times a day: every 20 minutes, I'd go in to GCal to check my upcoming events, create a meeting, or do some other simple action. Each of them doesn't take long - always under a minute. However, the annoying part was that I'd forget about what I was working on before - the cost of context-switching.

That is why we built a non-immersive calendar experience. An user would hit a shortcut to load up their calendar nearly instantly on the page itself. From there, Motion makes actions like creating events or sharing availability easier with better UX and built-in workflows. For example, to share your availabilities with someone, Motion automates that workflow (by using your personal preferences and running a logic on existing events to maximize maker's time). Once you are done using the calendar, just hit escape to get rid of it. You haven't left the page at all.

We are also working on a desktop app, as we'd love to use the calendar inside apps like Zoom and PyCharm.

We believe this kind of non-immersive approach can apply to all actions that take less than a minute - such as checking the email you just received or viewing a Jira ticket. For longer tasks that require deeper focus, an immersive experience is necessary - such as note-taking or coding. Here's our vision: in the future, whenever you need to perform a quick action in another app, instead of switching over to that app, Motion would bring to you the only component you need (an input form, a message, a textbox...etc).

We'd love to hear your feedback, and let us know what other apps would benefit from this non-immersive approach.

Hey HN!

We built a chrome extension that lets you load your calendar from any website quickly without switching context (i.e. switch to another tab or app).

I personally have a busy calendar, and didn't like jumping in and out of GCal 30 times a day: every 20 minutes, I'd go in to GCal to check my upcoming events, create a meeting, or do some other simple action. Each of them doesn't take long - always under a minute. However, the annoying part was that I'd forget about what I was working on before - the cost of context-switching.

That is why we built a non-immersive calendar experience. An user would hit a shortcut to load up their calendar nearly instantly on the page itself. From there, Motion makes actions like creating events or sharing availability easier with better UX and built-in workflows. For example, to share your availabilities with someone, Motion automates that workflow (by using your personal preferences and running a logic on existing events to maximize maker's time). Once you are done using the calendar, just hit escape to get rid of it. You haven't left the page at all.

We are also working on a desktop app, as we'd love to use the calendar inside apps like Zoom and PyCharm.

We believe this kind of non-immersive approach can apply to all actions that take less than a minute - such as checking the email you just received or viewing a Jira ticket. For longer tasks that require deeper focus, an immersive experience is necessary - such as note-taking or coding. Here's our vision: in the future, whenever you need to perform a quick action in another app, instead of switching over to that app, Motion would bring to you the only component you need (an input form, a message, a textbox...etc).

We'd love to hear your feedback, and let us know what other apps would benefit from this non-immersive approach.

Totally get your friend's concern. Google is kinda bad in that they bundle a bunch of permissions into one (i.e. - all data read and changed...etc); we only need a small subset of that, and we have a very strict privacy policy not seen in other extensions, but users usually don't dig into our policy and get scared by that dialogue (which is totally understandable and I would be too).

Thanks! Love to hear what you think

Thank you! Definitely.

Thank you! Would love to learn your thoughts :)

Thanks for the suggestion. I see, that's very valid. I've added it to our todo list - don't block if it's not the active tab.

Thanks for recommending that. We actually do one better - we not only count time when browser tab is active, but also stop counting time when we don't detect activity or video playing for longer than 5 minutes :)

Firefox coming soon!

Thank you!

That sounds very valid - when we built this, we had the working mentality, but unwanted distraction when relaxing would definitely be useful for ourselves.

Thanks for sharing! Agreed that both of these solutions are helpful, and I've seen many friends using them. For me personally, I wanted a more all-in-one solution, so we actually built hiding things like the Facebook newsfeed and Youtube recommended videos into our extension.