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Off topic but I really dislike the trend of using “human readable durations” like “a month ago”, just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself. Out
by Xenoamorphous 2y ago
Off topic but I really dislike the trend of using “human readable durations” like “a month ago”, just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself.
Outlook (Mac version at least) is the worst offender. For emails prior to the current day it will say for example just “yesterday” and it will only show you the time if you click on the email. I get dozens of mails per day, having just “yesterday” for 50 messages in a row is useless.
- gravescale 2y agoIf you have your system time wrong somehow, GitLab will happily tell you a bug fix was closed in 4 hours' time.
- perilunar 2y ago> just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself. But use ISO 8601 or a month name FFS — dd/mm or mm/dd is not always obvious.
- latexr 2y agoHover over the date to see the exact day and time.
- Sakos 2y agoGitlab shows this relative date. I repeatedly have this issue where I'm trying to look through commits and I have to mouse over every single commit repeatedly while trying to figure out when something was changed in relation to other changes. So I mouse over one, mouse over the next, go back to the previous one, forget what the other one was, mouse over that, then mouse over a fourth and repeat. Who came up with this insane bullshit? It'll show me a bunch of commits all made 4 days ago. I have no idea what day that was. Was it Monday? Wednesday? I have logs from the 16th, does Gitlab think that was 4 days ago or 5?
- jvdvegt 2y agoHover? I'm on mobile...
- latexr 2y agoAt least on bugzilla, I’m able to tap and hold to get the same effect.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoThis is kind of an aside, but hover is a perfectly valid UI mechanism, and I intensely dislike the trend of kneecapping the UI just to make it work on a touch screen. Some things just don't work well if you don't have a mouse. That doesn't mean we should throw them away. It just means that sometimes you need a mouse for real work. There's nothing wrong with that.
- b112 2y agoTo each their own, I absolutely despise anything popping up, ever. Stuff appearing and disappearing as I move my mouse around angers me, and I get even more annoyed when things pop up if I put my mouse somewhere to park it. A full blown conniption fit happens if I park my mouse, start to read something, and a popup thing gets in the way. The neighbours know when that happens.
- apitman 2y agoI think the point is more that if a feature requires a mouse to work, maybe that mode should be the optional path so it still works on mobile.
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoIn Outlook for Mac if I hover "Yesterday" in the tooltip I get... "Yesterday".
- latexr 2y agoI see now it wasn’t clear, but I was referring to bugzilla. I don’t use Outlook.
- tomovo 2y ago"Xenoamorphous 4 minutes ago", got it. Edit: 5 minutes ago.
- antonvs 2y agoI think you'll find it was 1 hour and 5 minutes ago.
- Xenoamorphous 2y agoHa! Maybe, maybe for something happening in the past day or so it’s ok, esp. due to timezone conversion confusion. But for anything older than that, just show me the date!
- afiori 2y agoPersonally it is more about avoiding big relative errors: 1 month ago can be between 10 and 45 days ago (maybe, nobody knows how the rounding works). 8 months ago is less of problem
- LM358 2y agoEven worse when it's wrong, Discogs insists that October 2021 is "over three years ago"
- Minor49er 2y agoThis seems on brand for Discogs and their awful design changes lately. They also replaced fast-loading pages with super slow AJAX requests (reminiscent of the equally disastrous C2 Wiki's similar design update from years ago). Discogs also is now randomly censoring album art until you log in for some reason, but only for the main image on a release page and not in the dozen of other places where the album art appears on a page otherwise </rant>
- sapiogram 2y agoEarlier this years, Github would routinely say "2 years ago" for comments made 11 months ago.
- sanderjd 2y agoI like it iff I can hover over the human readable version to get the actual timestamp.
- nuccy 2y agoBetter the opposite - date by default and on hover human readable. People would more likely want to copy the actual date than the human readable delta.
- sanderjd 2y agoAgree to disagree :) The "human readable" is better at a glance, and timestamps are better when I care about the specifics. > People would more likely want to copy the actual date than the human readable delta. I agree that this is true when copying, but text is primarily for reading, not copying.
- saurik 2y ago> I get dozens of mails per day, having just “yesterday” for 50 messages in a row is useless. How is this "better at a glance"?!
- sanderjd 2y agoLike I said, agree to disagree, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks and all that, but to me, after a day, the most pertinent at-a-glance information there is "this was received yesterday". I definitely think it's more useful for more recent things that can say "37 minutes ago" or "3 hours ago", but to me, "yesterday" is also useful. (I might prefer it if it said "yesterday morning" and "yesterday evening" or something like that, but I rarely care about the exact time, after a day.)
- stemlord 2y agoI find dates more readable as an ordered list of numbers. A thread can be quickly scrolled down through while seeing >2001 then eventually >2024 at the same x-position on the page. Same goes with the month then day. Anyway, in the context of a comment/activity thread, how long ago from today that an entry was tends to be less important than the age of the comment relative to the other comments.
- jimnotgym 2y ago> just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself. I, however, really struggle with this. I have a real problem with any concept of dates or the passing of time.
- afiori 2y agoThen show a detailed timestamp in a tooltip.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Affric 2y agoHoly shit. Human readable. The actual timestamp/email address/detail is what I need to see to make decisions!
- freedomben 2y agoSeriously, I cannot wait for this trend to die. It makes a huge difference if an email was received at 6:00 a.m. or if it was received at 11:00 p.m. that day. Simply saying "yesterday" is not good enough! I like my beer cold and my time stamps precise.
- Zuiii 2y agoDesign over function at microsoft. The new outlook 365 seems to have removed the time component from older entries so even when they show you the date, it won't include the time. If you have 20 emails per day, you'll have to open them one by one until you find the one you need. I wish there is a way to revert to the old behavior but microsoft support says we don't need this.
- sayrer 2y agoIt helps to avoid timezone details within a day or two. I agree "a month ago" is pretty bad, but I haven't seen that. But it's good to say "1hr ago" if I send an email from New York to San Francisco.