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Suggestion: add the states and provinces of the world as if they are cities. Sometimes you know the person you're scheduling is in California/US, Alberta/Cana
by sivers 15y ago
Suggestion: add the states and provinces of the world as if they are cities.
Sometimes you know the person you're scheduling is in California/US, Alberta/Canada, or Bahia/Brazil. But since those are not cities they're not coming up in your location search.
- danohuiginn 15y agoalso, add GMT. Currently, I get 'no matches found' from putting GMT into the search box!
- mseebach 15y agoCareful! GMT != the time in London, as many people tend to assume. Britain is currently on BST (British Summer Time) which is GMT+1.
- StavrosK 15y agoThis. Almost nobody needs GMT, so it would be better if it was left out, to avoid confusion. I can't tell you how many times people showed up in meetings an hour earlier because they said "GMT" and meant "BST".
- Arubis 15y agoBelieve it or not, West Africa exists. Perhaps a better indicator would be regional, ie. Casablanca/Dakar (+0h). edit: reply below (correctly) points out that Casablanca is on WET. go figure.
- mseebach 15y agoThe only reliable indicator of offset is political geographical features. This would also keep you from making the exact error that the parent pointed out, as Casablanca is observing summertime and is thus currently in GMT+1. As far as I can tell, the only territory currently at GMT+0 is Cape Verde, which I would think it's fair to classify as "almost no-one".
- cashman 15y agoReykjavik, Iceland, is always at GMT+0 and has no DST. http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=211 http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=211 (That doesn't really contradict "almost no-one", of course.)
- mseebach 15y agoSo according to http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/gmt.html http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/e... http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/africa/gmt.html http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/a... a comprehensive list of territories observing GMT all year: * Iceland * Burkina Faso * Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) * Gambia * Ghana * Guinea-Bissau * Guinea * Liberia * Mali * Mauritania * Saint Helena * Sao Tome and Principe * Senegal * Sierra Leone * Togo
- skrebbel 15y agothere certainly are time zones with less than 500k inhabitants. if you're dropping GMT+0, it'd only be fair to drop those other time zones too!
- Arubis 15y agoIf I may prove one of your points whule disputing another... I could've sworn Casablanca was GMT, and I live in a GMT territory. So, yes, it is confusing. However, it's also worth pointing out that there _are_ people living here. This comment's sibling describes GMT as <500k inhabitants, but Dakar alone has over a million residents.
- mseebach 15y agoErrata: Cape Verde is the only territory currently at GMT-1. Got my timezone trivia wrong, sorry.
- fanf2 15y agoThere are occasional cases where a location isn't enough to identify a TZ rule. The most famous is Xinjiang where the Han run on Beijing time (like the rest of China) and the Uighurs run on Beijing-2 (traditional and more normal for their location) and both live in the same place. But that's a pathological case :-) More seriously, iCalendar, the main standard for exchanging schedules, has broken models of time and place, and I don't see any desire to fix it properly. http://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html http://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html
- StavrosK 15y agoThat's what I was implying with my comment above, i.e. that the selector should mention the region rather than the abstract timezone. By "almost nobody" I meant the people who need to use the abstract timezone rather than refer to some specific area.
- gmac 15y agoEven better, put it in, but pop up an explanation along the lines of these comments if anyone chooses it. Less frustration, more education.
- edanm 15y agoExcept that users tend not to read text.
- gmac 15y agoTrue(ish), but you don't have to make it text-heavy. Some kind of warning symbol and a brief message ("Are you sure? Only $OBSCURE_COUNTRIES use GMT.") would surely suffice.
- pasbesoin 15y agoColor it red or something (the GMT data entry/line itself, I mean) (qualification: I haven't looked at the application, yet -- much.)
- fanf2 15y agoMicrosoft Exchange and Outlook refer to UK time as GMT regardless of the time of year. They really are astonishingly stupid about time.
- officemonkey 15y agoAlso, suggest adding "ZULU" as a synonym for GMT and UTC.
- stingraycharles 15y agoI'm in no way an expert in this area, but I believe GMT != UTC, so it seems strange to add a synonym for both of them.
- rmc 15y agoGMT and UTC are the same time. I think there are silly differences w.r.t. subsecond precision and times before a certain date, but for all practical purposes GMT=UTC. However London is not always on GMT, so there are times when GMT is not London-time.
- stingraycharles 15y agoOk, makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
- officemonkey 15y agoBTW, England's "Daylight Saving Time" is called "British Summer Time" (BST), which I always thought was an enchanting time zone descriptor.
- dspillett 15y agoTo be anal: technically GMT is closer to UT1. UTC is never "known" until after the time you are referring to as it is the reading from an atomic clock with some leap-seconds. The exact adjustment is not decided (though can generally be predicted) until IERS publishes DU1 for the time. Though if you are not needing long period times more accurate than +/- 0.9s you can consider GMT, UT1 and UTC to be equivalent, and for sub-second measures you need to reference a local timer. This is essentially how NTPd works too - it keeps a local timer with reference to hardware events like timer interrupts plus some skew values and this is what your OS ends up using to track small amounts of time, and readings from external clocks are used to tweak the skew values so that this local timer doesn't fall too far out of sync. The skew relationship between UT1 and UTC is called DUT1. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time for more than you care to know about UTC (and, if you do care that much or simply have some serious procrastinating to work on, other references are listed too for further reading). On London time not being GMT for half of the year, this can be a hassle. We are UK based as are our current clients for the most part. One of the larger ones (a major bank, but for contractual reasons I should probably refrain from mentioning their name) have their email and calendaring system set to GMT, which means that any time they invite us to a meeting or teleconference in this half of the year we have to adjust the time (as our mail+calendar arrangement are correctly set for UK time with daylight saving accounted for, as are the systems of our other clients) or turn up an hour late. Most irritating.
- pitdesi 15y agoLove the app. another suggestion: add airport codes. Some of us world traveling nerds think in airport codes, and it should be pretty easy to add. Also, the "delete" function looks like a red square in my chrome version, which puzzled me (although I see that you meant a red X in my Firefox)