Moving landscapes.

Landscapes, horizons, distance, color, and space. That's what the Almanac comes down to. I want this app to be like a walk through the forest where you have space to think good hard thoughts about life ahead.

If the Personal Almanac is like a walk in the forest, then a standard digital calendar is like driving your car to work. You just want to get to your destination without interruptions or traffic jams. Normal calendars are efficient and boring. The Almanac is inefficient and fun.

When I took up this project again, I wanted to simplify the experience and make the info you input more visible and readable. However, I think I've sacrificed some of the beauty of walking in the forest in an attempt to make the Almanac more "usable". I need to find the balance between these two.

The original Almanac looks beautiful while panning through the landscape. However the way this effect is achieved severely limits the diversity of the scenery. Since the landscape is cut up into strips which all move at different rates, there's no good way to transition from water to some other feature.

My current exploration compresses the foreground into a single layer making transitions to different landscapes really easy. However, the parallax effect is severely limited in this model and everything seams flat while in motion.

It's a matter of determining which aspects of the experience are the most important. The diversity of the landscape or the richness of the parallax.