Comment by pmontra
1 year ago
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".
”Trivial” as a description of datetime problems is a sign you haven’t thought about it enough. If I call my mom at 6pm every day to check on her, I don’t want that time to jump around as I visit New York. It is the same time for her not me. (I might actually want it to jump around when she visits New York!) Same for my plan to watch a football game, it won’t be rescheduled just because I’m watching from somewhere else.
Not trivial at all. How does the phone know what I meant if I’m not willing to specify?
4 replies →
What if I have two devices in different time zones? Should such an event show up at different times on each?
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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.
>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?
If you add an event while in London that is going to happen in New York at 7pm NY time, you set it at "7pm".
So you see it as "7pm event" while in London - but you know e.g. that this 7pm event concerns your visit to the Mets game in NY.
Then, when you land in New York and the timezone changes, you still see them as 7pm. What you entered is interpreted by default as a timezone-less absolute time. The same if, while in NYC, you set a feature 11pm event that will happen in London. When you get to London, it shows as an 11pm event.
Now, if the event you want to set needs coordination with different people, it could have a toggle like "tag with local timezone" or allow to set an explicit one, and then another toggle to "translate to local timezone to the people you're sharing this with". So, as I wrote above, in that case:
"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>".
And they, of course, should see "Meeting: 2pm" on theirs.
>there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone.
Sure there is. UTC. It's just laziness that doesn't have people adopt it.
Shared events should be shown in UTC, and next to it, your local translated time of that (and the name of the place of timezone). Then an easy selector to see it translated to any other timezone.
I think what was discussed above is perfectly good UI: The timezone for an appointment can be "local" (which IMO should be the default).