# Thoughts on HEY Calendar Basecamp developers (37Signals) have done it again, this time with a delightful calendar implementation that perfectly complements HEY Mail. I sympathize with the statement that HEY Mail fixed a technology everybody loves to hate. Since I made the switch in the summer of 2020 (right after it was officially released), I've grown to love it, and I can say today that I cannot imagine going back to Gmail or similar. The newly released HEY Calendar, a companion calendar for HEY Mail, removes a barrier of entry expressed by several people I've recommended it to. One of the reasons I became a HEY fanboy was the design and development philosophy followed by its developers. After listening to a podcast where they introduced HEY Mail, I made sure to consume every single article, video, podcast, and even book ([Shape Up](https://basecamp.com/books/shapeup)) these guys produced because I think they're onto something when it comes to app design. Not that it's necessarily their own invention: they follow a principle they call "less is more," which is a guiding principle of minimalism. It is evident with HEY Calendar: the UI is simple and uncluttered, very much unlike my Outlook work calendar, whose ribbon reminds me of an airplane cockpit. In Outlook I can make an appointment, a meeting (don't ask me what the difference is), a Teams meeting, a Zoom meeting, and a TeamViewer meeting. I can use Viva insights, templating, categorization, AI, polls, and 20+ other things. I never used 98% of those features, and the ones I actually use I have to look for every single time because I keep getting lost in the UI. In contrast, HEY Calendar is a breath of fresh air, even though it has features Outlook lacks. You can add headings to dates, a feature so useful you'll wonder why no other calendar does that. Sure, you can add whole-day events to any calendar, but when you have overlapping whole-day events, the less relevant ones overshadow that one birthday (or deadline) you really care about. You can emphasize certain events by circling them, something I used to do all the time when I used a paper calendar, and add background pictures to days, which makes the calendar more personal and fun to use. And all of that in an easy-to-use and somewhat quirky UI that I really love. The tendency to cluttered user interfaces evident today is due to the monetization strategy that uses advertising as a primary source of revenue.[^1] Aside from the obvious privacy concerns, that business model has one more significant side-effect when it comes to software – poorly designed UIs that aim to satisfy everyone (and piss off no one). That is because companies are awarded for increased market share (which attracts more advertisers), and so they aim to make 100% of the population 60-80% satisfied (or even less, if the competition is similarly lacking). Quirky app designs are thus out, and plurality of features is given priority at the expense of a cluttered interface (because god forbid the competition has a feature you don't). Because they are funded directly by customers, products like HEY are different because their developers don't have to pay too much attention to the market share. They can allow themselves to be opinionated and thus make 10% of the population (or less) 100% satisfied. Quirky (or minimalistic) UIs are thus in, as the focus is on a specific feature set that is aimed at a smaller group of people. You may not like HEY Mail and Calendar, but if you do, you will surely love it. [^1]: [[Rant About Free Software]]