Comment by lazyasciiart
1 year ago
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?
The point is that it's far safer to assume that an unspecified time zone means 'local time wherever I am at the time of the appointment' than not. If I'm flying to Japan and meeting someone at 7pm, I'm going to make an appointment 'Izakaya at 7pm'. I definitely don't want the software to change that to 1am, and I cannot think of a use case where I would.
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What if I have two devices in different time zones? Should such an event show up at different times on each?
Yes, since it happens at a different local time at each.
Your 5pm London event happens when it's 12pm in NYC.
Yes. It stands to reason that you'll only see the ones where you actually are.
Yeah, probably. That's how time zones work.
It could theoretically use the location field to show a warning like "Which time zone, current or event location?"