Comment by Kwpolska
1 year ago
The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.
> The calendar thing is working correctly.
Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.
There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
It is possible on macOS with the Floating time zone: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#i...
This doesn’t look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar apps.
Thanks for the link. Apple's language on this whole mess is of no help. First there's their use of "Turn on time zone support" which is meaningless. You'd think this would be the solution: turning it off and breathing a sigh of relief. But no; this does not stop the behavior.
As far as "floating," it says: "To keep the event from moving when you view a different time zone, choose Floating."
When I VIEW a different time zone? Does this also mean when I'm IN a different time zone?
Anyway... I will have to create a dummy "floating" appointment on my Mac before my next trip and see what the phone does with it when I get there. But it sure seems like this setting needs to exist on the mobile devices too...
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Exactly. I was thinking through how I would want this expressed in the UI, and
Time zone: Local
was exactly what I came up with.
The absurd thing about Apple's approach is, as you point out, that it serves the tiny minority of use cases. Who the hell looks up the time zone of everything they're going to do when they're traveling around? I just want it to use the time shown on the phone!
Edit event -> tap the time -> time zone -> type the city name.
(No need to look up the timezone.)
I agree that calendar’s UI is a bit of a tire fire. One of Apple’s core UI design tenants is that you should be continuously surprised and delighted when you use iPhone, and then share your discoveries with friends to build up an Apple user community.
I don’t want the phone to surprise and delight me, or hide major features like a 1990’s microsoft excel easter egg.
For instance, why in the hell are “magnifier” and “scan + ocr document to pdf” not in the camera app?
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TBH who enters their events manually? Most important events (flights, meetings, …) get on my calendar via invite (or ics download for eg flight) and have all pertinent timezone info set correctly
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Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly.
I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
Many people enter appointments without enough detail to say it is not going to be held at your current location. e.g for a planned vacation "3pm check for concert tickets", which will indeed stay at PST and show up on your phone at 6pm in New York.
It's trivial to consider any event that did not specify a time zone to happen at local time, wherever that is, and not change its time when the phone's zone changes. Business software will set a zone, self-entered or casual appointments won't, so that matches usage. At worst, display a warning sign on the calendar entry. The default is "do no harm", not "we didn't know you didn't mean us not to do harm".
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It could theoretically use the location field to show a warning like "Which time zone, current or event location?"
>Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event.
I want it shown to me at my local time, so I'm prepared without having to care what offset they are.
If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
The problem is that the phone doesn’t know where you will be in the future or how you personally think about time. If you are typically in New York, but plan to be in San Francisco next week, and you make some one-off meetings during your visit, how should the phone show you your “next week” view? Should it show the meetings in NY time while you are in NY even though you’ll be in SF next week? What about regular weekly meetings you’ll be attending this week in NY and next week in SF. They will be at different times depending on where you are. But if you are looking ahead and planning your trip, you’re going to get confused.
The unfortunate truth is that there’s no simple UI fix for this problem. Even if the phone could infer or just be told where you will be in the future, there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone.
If you travel for work a lot, you come up with your own way of dealing with this stuff. If you travel for work rarely, you’re going to be confused and frustrated no matter what.
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Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time.
So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.
You don’t travel much for work do you? If your calendar is just for you, then fine. But if you have to coordinate with anyone else, you can’t be so sloppy. The phone doesn’t know what you mean unless you tell it.
If you're referring to me, that's a backward conclusion. I travel plenty; and every time I do, Apple messes up my appointments.
Clock time without a time zone is underspecified. It might refer to the users current timezone? Or at the time of the event? But what if you invite a user in another timezone? You’re going to miss each other by hours.
This is a good point, which has a simple solution: You can't leave the timezone as "none" or "floating" if you invite people.
Yeah, the computer needs some heuristic to “guess” when an under-specified time is created. No matter how it guessed, somebody would be upset.