Comment by lores
1 year ago
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.
If you're in Istanbul, and you're going to meet at 7pm Izakaya time, why would you enter 7pm Istanbul time? Put 1am Istanbul time or, more sensibly, enter the appointment as 7pm Izakaya time.
I don't want my calendar changing appointment times on me. If I say 7pm when I'm in Istanbul, I expect it to alert at 7pm when I'm in Istanbul, 8pm if I'm in Dubai, 9pm if I'm in Karachi, and 1am if I'm in Izakaya. Entering it without a timezone should reasonably default to the timezone the calendar was in when the appointment was entered.
Let's take an example: suppose I have a calendar appointment to call my partner, at 7pm Istanbul time. I'm in Istanbul, and I enter 7pm with the "floating" scheduling method. Then, I travel to New Zealand, and at 7pm NZ time, alarm goes off, so I call my partner. Unfortunately, it is 9am in Istanbul, not 7pm: the floating screwed up the schedule. Including timezone in the appointment would have prevented this issue.
Let's take another example: you're in Istanbul, traveling to one of your company's remote offices in NZ for a week for a summit, and have your agenda set out in "floating" time according to NZ timezone. Then, a storm rolls in, and you can't fly out, so you'll attend the same appointments remotely. But now you must edit each and every appointment to reflect their new "floating" time according to Istanbul. Including timezone in the appointments would have prevented this issue.
2 replies →
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.