Wednesday, September 14, 2016

timezone'd

Time zone support in iOS' default Calendar app is missing one feature: to set the time zone for an event, and then see displayed as it will be when the user is in that time zone.

For instance, if I'm in Boston now and traveling to Dublin next week and have a 10AM meeting scheduled there, does it really make sense to have that display as a 5AM meeting until my own time zone changes?

There's a "Time Zone Override" feature that I thought could fix this, but no... that would just let me see an event relative to Boston time no matter where I was and what I had the time zone set to.

It's a fraught issue with lots of UI/UX edge cases, but I think the best option would be to have a default setting of "assume I'll be in the timezone of future events" that can be overridden on a per-event basis (like if you're scheduling a video call across timezones, and want to know when to get online even as the time is set by their standards) and have a little tag like "Dublin time" for events that are being displayed with the assumption that you'll be at that timezone then.

And of course, shared calendars take even more finesse to get the user's intention across...

Does any calendar app handle this really well?

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