6 ms·

The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other pe

The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.

pmontra 2y ago
Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly. I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
- lazyasciiart 2y 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.
  - cosmotic 2y ago
    It could theoretically use the location field to show a warning like "Which time zone, current or event location?"
  - lores 2y 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".
    - jen20 2y ago
      What if I have two devices in different time zones? Should such an event show up at different times on each?
      - BobaFloutist 2y ago
        Yeah, probably. That's how time zones work.
      - DidYaWipe 2y ago
        Yes. It stands to reason that you'll only see the ones where you actually are.
      - coldtea 2y ago
        Yes, since it happens at a different local time at each. Your 5pm London event happens when it's 12pm in NYC.
    - skywhopper 2y ago
      Not trivial at all. How does the phone know what I meant if I’m not willing to specify?
      - lores 2y ago
        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.
        ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
        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.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. I want it shown to me at my local time, so I'm prepared without having to care what offset they are. If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    The problem is that the phone doesn’t know where you will be in the future or how you personally think about time. If you are typically in New York, but plan to be in San Francisco next week, and you make some one-off meetings during your visit, how should the phone show you your “next week” view? Should it show the meetings in NY time while you are in NY even though you’ll be in SF next week? What about regular weekly meetings you’ll be attending this week in NY and next week in SF. They will be at different times depending on where you are. But if you are looking ahead and planning your trip, you’re going to get confused. The unfortunate truth is that there’s no simple UI fix for this problem. Even if the phone could infer or just be told where you will be in the future, there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone. If you travel for work a lot, you come up with your own way of dealing with this stuff. If you travel for work rarely, you’re going to be confused and frustrated no matter what.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      I think what was discussed above is perfectly good UI: The timezone for an appointment can be "local" (which IMO should be the default).
    - coldtea 2y ago
      >If you are typically in New York, but plan to be in San Francisco next week, and you make some one-off meetings during your visit, how should the phone show you your “next week” view? If you add an event while in London that is going to happen in New York at 7pm NY time, you set it at "7pm". So you see it as "7pm event" while in London - but you know e.g. that this 7pm event concerns your visit to the Mets game in NY. Then, when you land in New York and the timezone changes, you still see them as 7pm. What you entered is interpreted by default as a timezone-less absolute time. The same if, while in NYC, you set a feature 11pm event that will happen in London. When you get to London, it shows as an 11pm event. Now, if the event you want to set needs coordination with different people, it could have a toggle like "tag with local timezone" or allow to set an explicit one, and then another toggle to "translate to local timezone to the people you're sharing this with". So, as I wrote above, in that case: "If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>". And they, of course, should see "Meeting: 2pm" on theirs. >there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone. Sure there is. UTC. It's just laziness that doesn't have people adopt it. Shared events should be shown in UTC, and next to it, your local translated time of that (and the name of the place of timezone). Then an easy selector to see it translated to any other timezone.
kruuuder 2y ago
> The calendar thing is working correctly. Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't. In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default. There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
- louis-paul 2y ago
  It is possible on macOS with the Floating time zone: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#icl24c26dd16 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#i... This doesn’t look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar apps.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. Apple's language on this whole mess is of no help. First there's their use of "Turn on time zone support" which is meaningless. You'd think this would be the solution: turning it off and breathing a sigh of relief. But no; this does not stop the behavior. As far as "floating," it says: "To keep the event from moving when you view a different time zone, choose Floating." When I VIEW a different time zone? Does this also mean when I'm IN a different time zone? Anyway... I will have to create a dummy "floating" appointment on my Mac before my next trip and see what the phone does with it when I get there. But it sure seems like this setting needs to exist on the mobile devices too...
    - dcrazy 2y ago
      In the macOS version of Calendar, “Time Zone Support” is the name of a feature in the Settings window. When you check that checkbox, twi things happen: - the event inspector adds a timezone selector the the Start and End date/time pickers - the window titlebar gains a timezone picker. The timezone picker in the window titlebar defaults to your system’s current timezone. When you create an event, the start and end times for that event default to the window’s current timezone. You can use the newly-revealed picker in the inspector to change the timezone of an event. There is a single picker that alters both the start and end time. If you set this to something other than the timezone chosen in the window’s titlebar, the event will move to reflect when it will occur in the window’s timezone. I am personally convinced this is what people want 99% of the time, and I think it’s silly that you have to check a checkbox in Calendar Settings to get it. It’s fairly common to receive details for an event in another timezone, such as a conference call or vacation. I live with Time Zone Support enabled on all my Macs, and while I rarely touch the timezone picker in the titlebar I make frequent use of the timezone picker when setting the event details window. There’s one special option in the event details timezone picker: “Floating”. This tells Calendar to always reckon the start and end times in the timezone selected in the window’s titlebar. So if you create an event that starts at 7am and set its timezone to “Floating”, the event will always be shown to begin at 7am even if you change your system’s timezone or the timezone in the titlebar. I don’t use this feature much, but it’s useful for plotting out your daily routine. If you go for at 6am every day, regardless of where you are on the planet, you can create a floating “Daily Run” event that starts at 6am and doesn’t shift as you travel. The iPhone version of calendar is designed differently. There is no “Time Zone Support” checkbox on iPhone. The event details view always shows time zone pickers for both the start and end times. This lets you create an event with the start and end times specified in local times in different timezones. I use this feature for every single flight I take, and I always have to enter them on my phone because the Mac doesn’t let you set the start and end timezones independently. But the iPhone doesn’t let you choose Floating in the time zone picker, so you can’t use it to create daily-routine events. Thankfully, all versions of Calendar preserve the data and behavior of events created on any platform, so you can create your Floating events in a Mac and your timezone-spanning flights on an iPhone and they will render as expected on the other device, including the Event Details window.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time. So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.
- kristjansson 2y ago
  Clock time without a time zone is underspecified. It might refer to the users current timezone? Or at the time of the event? But what if you invite a user in another timezone? You’re going to miss each other by hours.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Yeah, the computer needs some heuristic to “guess” when an under-specified time is created. No matter how it guessed, somebody would be upset.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    This is a good point, which has a simple solution: You can't leave the timezone as "none" or "floating" if you invite people.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  You don’t travel much for work do you? If your calendar is just for you, then fine. But if you have to coordinate with anyone else, you can’t be so sloppy. The phone doesn’t know what you mean unless you tell it.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    If you're referring to me, that's a backward conclusion. I travel plenty; and every time I do, Apple messes up my appointments.

pmontra 2y ago

Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. Of course it must be possible to set the time zone explicitly. I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.

lazyasciiart 2y 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.
- cosmotic 2y ago
  It could theoretically use the location field to show a warning like "Which time zone, current or event location?"
- lores 2y 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".
  - jen20 2y ago
    What if I have two devices in different time zones? Should such an event show up at different times on each?
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
      Yeah, probably. That's how time zones work.
    - DidYaWipe 2y ago
      Yes. It stands to reason that you'll only see the ones where you actually are.
    - coldtea 2y ago
      Yes, since it happens at a different local time at each. Your 5pm London event happens when it's 12pm in NYC.
  - skywhopper 2y ago
    Not trivial at all. How does the phone know what I meant if I’m not willing to specify?
    - lores 2y ago
      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.
      - ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
        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.
coldtea 2y ago
>Shouldn't the default time zone for an appointment be the one of the place it is held at? For online events, the time zone of the person setting the event. I want it shown to me at my local time, so I'm prepared without having to care what offset they are. If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
- skywhopper 2y ago
  The problem is that the phone doesn’t know where you will be in the future or how you personally think about time. If you are typically in New York, but plan to be in San Francisco next week, and you make some one-off meetings during your visit, how should the phone show you your “next week” view? Should it show the meetings in NY time while you are in NY even though you’ll be in SF next week? What about regular weekly meetings you’ll be attending this week in NY and next week in SF. They will be at different times depending on where you are. But if you are looking ahead and planning your trip, you’re going to get confused. The unfortunate truth is that there’s no simple UI fix for this problem. Even if the phone could infer or just be told where you will be in the future, there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone. If you travel for work a lot, you come up with your own way of dealing with this stuff. If you travel for work rarely, you’re going to be confused and frustrated no matter what.
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    I think what was discussed above is perfectly good UI: The timezone for an appointment can be "local" (which IMO should be the default).
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >If you are typically in New York, but plan to be in San Francisco next week, and you make some one-off meetings during your visit, how should the phone show you your “next week” view? If you add an event while in London that is going to happen in New York at 7pm NY time, you set it at "7pm". So you see it as "7pm event" while in London - but you know e.g. that this 7pm event concerns your visit to the Mets game in NY. Then, when you land in New York and the timezone changes, you still see them as 7pm. What you entered is interpreted by default as a timezone-less absolute time. The same if, while in NYC, you set a feature 11pm event that will happen in London. When you get to London, it shows as an 11pm event. Now, if the event you want to set needs coordination with different people, it could have a toggle like "tag with local timezone" or allow to set an explicit one, and then another toggle to "translate to local timezone to the people you're sharing this with". So, as I wrote above, in that case: "If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>". And they, of course, should see "Meeting: 2pm" on theirs. >there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone. Sure there is. UTC. It's just laziness that doesn't have people adopt it. Shared events should be shown in UTC, and next to it, your local translated time of that (and the name of the place of timezone). Then an easy selector to see it translated to any other timezone.

kruuuder 2y ago

> The calendar thing is working correctly. Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't. In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default. There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.

louis-paul 2y ago
It is possible on macOS with the Floating time zone: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#icl24c26dd16 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/calendar/icl1035/mac#i... This doesn’t look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar apps.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  Thanks for the link. Apple's language on this whole mess is of no help. First there's their use of "Turn on time zone support" which is meaningless. You'd think this would be the solution: turning it off and breathing a sigh of relief. But no; this does not stop the behavior. As far as "floating," it says: "To keep the event from moving when you view a different time zone, choose Floating." When I VIEW a different time zone? Does this also mean when I'm IN a different time zone? Anyway... I will have to create a dummy "floating" appointment on my Mac before my next trip and see what the phone does with it when I get there. But it sure seems like this setting needs to exist on the mobile devices too...
  - dcrazy 2y ago
    In the macOS version of Calendar, “Time Zone Support” is the name of a feature in the Settings window. When you check that checkbox, twi things happen: - the event inspector adds a timezone selector the the Start and End date/time pickers - the window titlebar gains a timezone picker. The timezone picker in the window titlebar defaults to your system’s current timezone. When you create an event, the start and end times for that event default to the window’s current timezone. You can use the newly-revealed picker in the inspector to change the timezone of an event. There is a single picker that alters both the start and end time. If you set this to something other than the timezone chosen in the window’s titlebar, the event will move to reflect when it will occur in the window’s timezone. I am personally convinced this is what people want 99% of the time, and I think it’s silly that you have to check a checkbox in Calendar Settings to get it. It’s fairly common to receive details for an event in another timezone, such as a conference call or vacation. I live with Time Zone Support enabled on all my Macs, and while I rarely touch the timezone picker in the titlebar I make frequent use of the timezone picker when setting the event details window. There’s one special option in the event details timezone picker: “Floating”. This tells Calendar to always reckon the start and end times in the timezone selected in the window’s titlebar. So if you create an event that starts at 7am and set its timezone to “Floating”, the event will always be shown to begin at 7am even if you change your system’s timezone or the timezone in the titlebar. I don’t use this feature much, but it’s useful for plotting out your daily routine. If you go for at 6am every day, regardless of where you are on the planet, you can create a floating “Daily Run” event that starts at 6am and doesn’t shift as you travel. The iPhone version of calendar is designed differently. There is no “Time Zone Support” checkbox on iPhone. The event details view always shows time zone pickers for both the start and end times. This lets you create an event with the start and end times specified in local times in different timezones. I use this feature for every single flight I take, and I always have to enter them on my phone because the Mac doesn’t let you set the start and end timezones independently. But the iPhone doesn’t let you choose Floating in the time zone picker, so you can’t use it to create daily-routine events. Thankfully, all versions of Calendar preserve the data and behavior of events created on any platform, so you can create your Floating events in a Mac and your timezone-spanning flights on an iPhone and they will render as expected on the other device, including the Event Details window.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

Mandatorily attaching a time zone to an event is the design defect. When a person in the real world is given the times of events, he is given those in the time local to where the event is happening. And when that person gets there, his phone will acquire that local time. So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.

kristjansson 2y ago
Clock time without a time zone is underspecified. It might refer to the users current timezone? Or at the time of the event? But what if you invite a user in another timezone? You’re going to miss each other by hours.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Yeah, the computer needs some heuristic to “guess” when an under-specified time is created. No matter how it guessed, somebody would be upset.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  This is a good point, which has a simple solution: You can't leave the timezone as "none" or "floating" if you invite people.
skywhopper 2y ago
You don’t travel much for work do you? If your calendar is just for you, then fine. But if you have to coordinate with anyone else, you can’t be so sloppy. The phone doesn’t know what you mean unless you tell it.
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  If you're referring to me, that's a backward conclusion. I travel plenty; and every time I do, Apple messes up my appointments.