8 ms·

This is the same as the alarm clock problem. When a user creates an event, what does that user _mean_? In the alarm clock example, what should happen if I've se

by rlpb 8y ago

This is the same as the alarm clock problem. When a user creates an event, what does that user _mean_? In the alarm clock example, what should happen if I've set my alarm clock 7am and then travel to a different time zone? In the conference event example, what should happen if the local time zone rules change, or daylight savings time comes into force? Did the event organiser print marketing materials that said "starts at 1000 UTC" or "starts at 10am" with a "in the local time zone" implication? Events generally need to be locked to _something_ - whether that is UTC or a local time zone depends on the application. The iCalendar standard (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545) generally gets this right.

maxxxxx 8y ago
That’s what annoys me about google calendar and most others. When I schedule an appointment most of the times it will be for the time zone i will be in at the time of the appointment. So when I travel and agree to meet people at 10 I want to enter it that way. But in most calendar apps everything gets shifted around as soon as I arrive at the new location. I would much prefer to have apps not shift stuff around unless I explicitly tell the app to do it.
- nfriedly 8y ago
  Google Calendar does let you set the time zone in the 'More options' view, FWIW. I use it occasionally.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I know. But I want no time zone. When I plan my Germany trip next week I want to see the 10 am meeting there at 10 regardless of where I am. It should operate like a good old paper calendar.
    - harpastum 8y ago
      Google Calendar is built around notifications and coordination, which both require an agreed upon "actual" time. The feature set you're looking for sounds more like an "agenda" to me.
      - Arnt 8y ago
        I think what he wants is that the software defers asking for a time zone until the item relates to two users who have different timezone. And that if the event arrives without having touched users in different timezones, then the software should infer that the event's timezone is the local timezone of all users at that point in time and space.
        kevincox 8y ago
        What I would like is to to be able to set my "local time schedule" and be able to do it in advance. So for example if I am traveling next week I can indicate that my local time will change. This is great not only for me but also for other people trying to schedule events in my calendar. With Gmail picking up flight and hotel confirmations this could even be mostly automatic.
    - jdblair 8y ago
      Its not that you want no time zone, you want to mark the appointment as "local" time. That could be useful, though I expect it would create as many problems as it solves. The explicit timezone is crucial for conference calls that cross timezones. That is at least half of the appointments on my calendar (I coordinate projects between the US, Europe and Asia).
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        For international phone meetings this is good but for travel it’s really bad.
        jdblair 8y ago
        I still disagree. I also travel a lot, and I set the meetings in the timezone where the meeting is. It's not a paper calendar.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        Right. When I travel I usually have a combination of physical meetings in local time and phone calls back home or spanning multiple time zones. I do mess up sometimes but I’m not sure how much you can automate.
    - zodiac 8y ago
      > It should operate like a good old paper calendar. In that case, you enter a recurring 10 am conference call every Monday, and the moment you move timezones you miss the call. The problem really is (as mentioned in this thread) that the user's intent is not known.
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        There are two use cases: one is for meetings with participants in different timezones. Gcal does this well. There other use case is travel. For this the current system is not very good.
        icebraining 8y ago
        Well, you know the timezone: it's of wherever in Germany the meeting will take place. I think the problem is the display: since you know you'll be in Germany from date X to Y, you should be able to configure the presentation timezone for those days (which would also show you those meetings in the local time when you'll have to make them).
    - lmm 8y ago
      Most people have more events that happen at a particular instant but different local times (e.g. phone calls between people in different timezones) than events that happen at a fixed local time but different instants. When I'm planning my trip to Germany I certainly don't want it showing all my calls at the wrong time.
    - rlpb 8y ago
      The iCalendar standard does actually support that, but perhaps Google Calendar's UI does not. I suspect it does work internally, because it interoperates with iCalendar fairly well. The standard calls it a "floating" DATE-TIME: "The recipient of an iCalendar object with a property value consisting of a local time, without any relative time zone information, SHOULD interpret the value as being fixed to whatever time zone the "ATTENDEE" is in at any given moment."
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- gh02t 8y ago
  There's a workaround, which is that you can set a time zone for an event in GCal.
- funcDropShadow 8y ago
  For that you would like to have an explicit "local time zone" option. I had recently similar in application I am developing, with datetime of which we are not sure in which time zone they are. That information might arrive later.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    On my Palm Pilot there was a “floating” time zone that behaved like this. But I can’t find this feature in any modern app. Outlook doesn’t have it either.
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      Apple's calendar has it on macOS, but not on iOS... (it's annoying how mobile everything always has to be so neutered)
      - Nemo157 8y ago
        And yet iOS calendar is also more powerful in that you can set different time zones on the start and end of a single event, which macOS calendar will show but not let you edit.
- ams6110 8y ago
  Paper calendar/planners don't have this problem. That's why I still use them.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- smhg 8y ago
  I think what you want, at least on the mobile Google Calendar app is under: Settings - General - Use device time zone If you disable this, you'll keep everything pinned to your preferred timezone. But I'm pretty sure a better approach is to select the timezone of the event. If it is at 10am in Germany, why not tell your calendar about this? Sure, this is an extra step, but it is part of the event's parameters (as pointed out in the OP).
BillinghamJ 8y ago
For ref, this is the relevant bit: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.3.5 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.3.5 This is something we (startup insurance company) have thought about a lot actually. Since the certificates we issue are relevant to a particular jurisdiction, if the document states e.g. "23:59:59", it means the "wall clock" time in that jurisdiction - whatever point-in-time our DB contains isn't really that relevant. So the likely problematic situ is if we've got a policy end date/time more than a year in advance, then the country changes their TZ offsets, we need to make sure our point-in-time records get updated (and then of course the duration of the policy changes). It's a bit of a pain in a system built around immutable events! On a kinda related note, we also took the decision to clearly define that our start/end date-times have a resolution of one second and are inclusive. So if a policy starts at 00:00:00 and ends at 23:59:59, that's the full day, all the way up to midnight. It also means then it's important that we render the full time (incl seconds) on our docs.
- danharaj 8y ago
  I bet you already know this but for the reader: the solution is to not think of times occurring with an offset but to rely on the IANA timezone database to figure out what a timezone means at a particular UTC time: https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    A question to both parent of this and this specifically. How would you deal with the current EU situation? They have recently voted to stop yearly transitions to summer time. But there must still be a timezone assigned to an event. Are you assigning timezones (in the certificates themselves) as the timezones of a particular geographic location,, rather than as time offsets?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - BillinghamJ 8y ago
bo1024 8y ago
In UI cases like this, I usually wish tech would err on the side of being transparent and predictable rather than trying to be smart. For example, if my alarm has been set to 10:00 (with no attached time zone), it should go off when the clock face reaches 10:00. I think python3's datetime has something like what you're pointing at -- objects are either timezone-aware or not. My complaint probably has to do with trying to hide this distinction from the user, when it would be more helpful to make it clear.
bshipp 8y ago
In situations with ambiguity like this, it's probably best to ask the user instead of make assumptions. I would not be remotely perturbed if my phone had a pop up when I stepped off the plane asking me if I still wanted to wake up at 7AM local or would prefer to wake up at 10AM UTC. I would be greatly perturbed if it assumed the latter and I missed my meeting, all because I forgot to set a timezone when I originally inserted it a month prior.
- BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
  If, at 12:30 AM on a Tuesday, you ask Siri to remind you about something “tomorrow”, Siri will ask if you meant Wednesday or Tuesday. I always thought that was a nice touch.
  - enobrev 8y ago
    In Gmail (and Inbox, RIP), the 12:30am "Snooze" action assumes "tomorrow" means 8am the same day. I'm not sure what time the switch-over becomes "8am the next day". I think around 4 or 5am. Once I learned that's what happens, it became just as useful as "later today". I use both quite a bit. I'd definitely rather not be asked every time - especially since I work at night and do most of my email management in that timeframe
- atomwaffel 8y ago
  What do you suggest in situations where you can’t do that? Last summer, I travelled on a sleeper train from Lisbon to Madrid, which are in different time zones. At the time that I set my alarm, my phone had no way of knowing that it would automatically jump an hour ahead in the middle of the night. In that specific case, it woke me up according to local time, which is what I expected. But what if I had crossed the time zone boundary less than an hour before I wanted to be woken up?
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    For the question of crossing a time zone boundary while using local time, I'd say the answer is obviously to go off the moment local time passes the alarm time. Going the other way is a more fun problem, but a few hours of debouncing is fine for anyone moving at suborbital speeds.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
madcaptenor 8y ago
And what if the event is an airplane flight that starts and ends in different time zones?
- FearNotDaniel 8y ago
  With Google calendar that's very easy, there's an option to specify different time zones for a single event's start and end times. It's also very useful that you can set the left margin (in the web app) to show two different time zones in a "ruler" format. So even if your overseas appointments for later in the week are displayed in terms of your current timezone, a quick glance across will confirm what their "local" time will be once you're on the ground.
  - madcaptenor 8y ago
    I use Apple's Calendar and had misremembered how it handled time zones. It handles them the same way.
lisper 8y ago
iCalendar (the Mac app, not the underlying representation) gets this badly wrong. It assumes that all events on the calendar are bound to the time zone that the computer was in when the event was entered. This is decidedly not the Right Thing when I travel. If I schedule an event for 7 AM, what I invariably mean is 7 AM in the local time zone where I am going to be on the day of the event, not on the day that I enter the event. The upshot is that if I travel and change my Mac's clock to local time, all of my events get screwed up. The first time this happened I nearly had a heart attack because I have years of history in my calendar. So I always leave my Mac's clock set to my home time zone and do the conversion in my head.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by rlpb 8y ago

maxxxxx 8y ago

That’s what annoys me about google calendar and most others. When I schedule an appointment most of the times it will be for the time zone i will be in at the time of the appointment. So when I travel and agree to meet people at 10 I want to enter it that way. But in most calendar apps everything gets shifted around as soon as I arrive at the new location. I would much prefer to have apps not shift stuff around unless I explicitly tell the app to do it.

nfriedly 8y ago
Google Calendar does let you set the time zone in the 'More options' view, FWIW. I use it occasionally.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I know. But I want no time zone. When I plan my Germany trip next week I want to see the 10 am meeting there at 10 regardless of where I am. It should operate like a good old paper calendar.
  - harpastum 8y ago
    Google Calendar is built around notifications and coordination, which both require an agreed upon "actual" time. The feature set you're looking for sounds more like an "agenda" to me.
    - Arnt 8y ago
      I think what he wants is that the software defers asking for a time zone until the item relates to two users who have different timezone. And that if the event arrives without having touched users in different timezones, then the software should infer that the event's timezone is the local timezone of all users at that point in time and space.
      - kevincox 8y ago
        What I would like is to to be able to set my "local time schedule" and be able to do it in advance. So for example if I am traveling next week I can indicate that my local time will change. This is great not only for me but also for other people trying to schedule events in my calendar. With Gmail picking up flight and hotel confirmations this could even be mostly automatic.
  - jdblair 8y ago
    Its not that you want no time zone, you want to mark the appointment as "local" time. That could be useful, though I expect it would create as many problems as it solves. The explicit timezone is crucial for conference calls that cross timezones. That is at least half of the appointments on my calendar (I coordinate projects between the US, Europe and Asia).
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      For international phone meetings this is good but for travel it’s really bad.
      - jdblair 8y ago
        I still disagree. I also travel a lot, and I set the meetings in the timezone where the meeting is. It's not a paper calendar.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Right. When I travel I usually have a combination of physical meetings in local time and phone calls back home or spanning multiple time zones. I do mess up sometimes but I’m not sure how much you can automate.
  - zodiac 8y ago
    > It should operate like a good old paper calendar. In that case, you enter a recurring 10 am conference call every Monday, and the moment you move timezones you miss the call. The problem really is (as mentioned in this thread) that the user's intent is not known.
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      There are two use cases: one is for meetings with participants in different timezones. Gcal does this well. There other use case is travel. For this the current system is not very good.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Well, you know the timezone: it's of wherever in Germany the meeting will take place. I think the problem is the display: since you know you'll be in Germany from date X to Y, you should be able to configure the presentation timezone for those days (which would also show you those meetings in the local time when you'll have to make them).
  - lmm 8y ago
    Most people have more events that happen at a particular instant but different local times (e.g. phone calls between people in different timezones) than events that happen at a fixed local time but different instants. When I'm planning my trip to Germany I certainly don't want it showing all my calls at the wrong time.
  - rlpb 8y ago
    The iCalendar standard does actually support that, but perhaps Google Calendar's UI does not. I suspect it does work internally, because it interoperates with iCalendar fairly well. The standard calls it a "floating" DATE-TIME: "The recipient of an iCalendar object with a property value consisting of a local time, without any relative time zone information, SHOULD interpret the value as being fixed to whatever time zone the "ATTENDEE" is in at any given moment."
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
gh02t 8y ago
There's a workaround, which is that you can set a time zone for an event in GCal.
funcDropShadow 8y ago
For that you would like to have an explicit "local time zone" option. I had recently similar in application I am developing, with datetime of which we are not sure in which time zone they are. That information might arrive later.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  On my Palm Pilot there was a “floating” time zone that behaved like this. But I can’t find this feature in any modern app. Outlook doesn’t have it either.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    Apple's calendar has it on macOS, but not on iOS... (it's annoying how mobile everything always has to be so neutered)
    - Nemo157 8y ago
      And yet iOS calendar is also more powerful in that you can set different time zones on the start and end of a single event, which macOS calendar will show but not let you edit.
ams6110 8y ago
Paper calendar/planners don't have this problem. That's why I still use them.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
smhg 8y ago
I think what you want, at least on the mobile Google Calendar app is under: Settings - General - Use device time zone If you disable this, you'll keep everything pinned to your preferred timezone. But I'm pretty sure a better approach is to select the timezone of the event. If it is at 10am in Germany, why not tell your calendar about this? Sure, this is an extra step, but it is part of the event's parameters (as pointed out in the OP).

BillinghamJ 8y ago

For ref, this is the relevant bit: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.3.5 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.3.5 This is something we (startup insurance company) have thought about a lot actually. Since the certificates we issue are relevant to a particular jurisdiction, if the document states e.g. "23:59:59", it means the "wall clock" time in that jurisdiction - whatever point-in-time our DB contains isn't really that relevant. So the likely problematic situ is if we've got a policy end date/time more than a year in advance, then the country changes their TZ offsets, we need to make sure our point-in-time records get updated (and then of course the duration of the policy changes). It's a bit of a pain in a system built around immutable events! On a kinda related note, we also took the decision to clearly define that our start/end date-times have a resolution of one second and are inclusive. So if a policy starts at 00:00:00 and ends at 23:59:59, that's the full day, all the way up to midnight. It also means then it's important that we render the full time (incl seconds) on our docs.

danharaj 8y ago
I bet you already know this but for the reader: the solution is to not think of times occurring with an offset but to rely on the IANA timezone database to figure out what a timezone means at a particular UTC time: https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  A question to both parent of this and this specifically. How would you deal with the current EU situation? They have recently voted to stop yearly transitions to summer time. But there must still be a timezone assigned to an event. Are you assigning timezones (in the certificates themselves) as the timezones of a particular geographic location,, rather than as time offsets?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - BillinghamJ 8y ago

bo1024 8y ago

In UI cases like this, I usually wish tech would err on the side of being transparent and predictable rather than trying to be smart. For example, if my alarm has been set to 10:00 (with no attached time zone), it should go off when the clock face reaches 10:00. I think python3's datetime has something like what you're pointing at -- objects are either timezone-aware or not. My complaint probably has to do with trying to hide this distinction from the user, when it would be more helpful to make it clear.

bshipp 8y ago

In situations with ambiguity like this, it's probably best to ask the user instead of make assumptions. I would not be remotely perturbed if my phone had a pop up when I stepped off the plane asking me if I still wanted to wake up at 7AM local or would prefer to wake up at 10AM UTC. I would be greatly perturbed if it assumed the latter and I missed my meeting, all because I forgot to set a timezone when I originally inserted it a month prior.

BurritoAlPastor 8y ago
If, at 12:30 AM on a Tuesday, you ask Siri to remind you about something “tomorrow”, Siri will ask if you meant Wednesday or Tuesday. I always thought that was a nice touch.
- enobrev 8y ago
  In Gmail (and Inbox, RIP), the 12:30am "Snooze" action assumes "tomorrow" means 8am the same day. I'm not sure what time the switch-over becomes "8am the next day". I think around 4 or 5am. Once I learned that's what happens, it became just as useful as "later today". I use both quite a bit. I'd definitely rather not be asked every time - especially since I work at night and do most of my email management in that timeframe
atomwaffel 8y ago
What do you suggest in situations where you can’t do that? Last summer, I travelled on a sleeper train from Lisbon to Madrid, which are in different time zones. At the time that I set my alarm, my phone had no way of knowing that it would automatically jump an hour ahead in the middle of the night. In that specific case, it woke me up according to local time, which is what I expected. But what if I had crossed the time zone boundary less than an hour before I wanted to be woken up?
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  For the question of crossing a time zone boundary while using local time, I'd say the answer is obviously to go off the moment local time passes the alarm time. Going the other way is a more fun problem, but a few hours of debouncing is fine for anyone moving at suborbital speeds.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

madcaptenor 8y ago

And what if the event is an airplane flight that starts and ends in different time zones?

FearNotDaniel 8y ago
With Google calendar that's very easy, there's an option to specify different time zones for a single event's start and end times. It's also very useful that you can set the left margin (in the web app) to show two different time zones in a "ruler" format. So even if your overseas appointments for later in the week are displayed in terms of your current timezone, a quick glance across will confirm what their "local" time will be once you're on the ground.
- madcaptenor 8y ago
  I use Apple's Calendar and had misremembered how it handled time zones. It handles them the same way.

lisper 8y ago

iCalendar (the Mac app, not the underlying representation) gets this badly wrong. It assumes that all events on the calendar are bound to the time zone that the computer was in when the event was entered. This is decidedly not the Right Thing when I travel. If I schedule an event for 7 AM, what I invariably mean is 7 AM in the local time zone where I am going to be on the day of the event, not on the day that I enter the event. The upshot is that if I travel and change my Mac's clock to local time, all of my events get screwed up. The first time this happened I nearly had a heart attack because I have years of history in my calendar. So I always leave my Mac's clock set to my home time zone and do the conversion in my head.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]