Just to chime in, one thing you might want to take into account is
"when" a user would actually care. Personally, If I were making
appointments (even if I knew I were traveling) I would not concern t
myself with timezone. -- I would always expect my calendar to be in my
"home" time zone, or even better, not care about timezone unless it may
cause a conflict such as the two circumstances below:
*For me, there are only two circumstances where the timezone I am in
matters: *
1) if an appointment I am making might conflict with travel across
timezones (such as an international flight) This is a very strange case.
It means I have an event (airplane flight) that starts in one timezone,
and ends in another!
2) if I am planning a conference call across timezones, i.e. if I
have a phone meeting with a matthew and bobby. In the conference call
case, I would expect the event to list all the times for all the parties
involved: (12:00 noon my calendar time, 2:00pm matthews time)
Another example of why I would not want any calendar changing time zones
without my explicit control:
I am traveling to a conference in Chicago, and I make an appointment to
meet a colleague for lunch (12:00), even though (12:00) in Pacific
Standard Time(my "home" time zone) would nominally translate to 2:00 pm
Chicago time. However, I KNOW I am going to Chicago, and if I set an
appointment for 12:00 noon, I would assume its for 12:00 noon whether I
am in Chicago or San Francisco. Since chandler has no notion of
geographic travel, I don't want it switching time zones on me. Also, I
don't want to do the mental math required to set a lunch date of 2:00:pm
Pacific Standard Time (my "home" time zone) just to make sure the lunch
date appears at noon when I arrive in Chicago and my calendar resets its
timezone or I connect from an Internet cafe with a computer whose clock
is set to Central Standard Time. Does this make sense?
One last thing, it may simply suffice when traveling to show two clocks
on somewhere on the calendar display: Calendar time, and current
geographic time.
Apologies for the long note.
Jeremy Epstein
Bobby Rullo wrote:
On Apr 19, 2006, at 12:08 PM, Steve Lewis wrote:
Bobby Rullo wrote:
Also possibly a 3rd:
3. System "guesses" initial timezone based on IP address to location
table for initial log in
[delurk]
A fourth possibility would be to detect their timezone every time they
log in. If the current client's detected timezone is different, ask the
user if he/she would like to adjust the user's timezone, and the
calendar view, to use the detected time zone or continue to use the
stored timezone.
Interesting idea. We'd have to make it annoying proof so that the dude
who always wants their timezone to be EST even though they are in CA
doesn't get harassed.
You can determine the timezone without the IP address to location table
which has a significant margin of error.
As a hint toward implementation, adapt or adopt this javascript library:
http://west.ilrn.com/media/js/systemCheck/timezone.js
That only works if the system's time has changed. Like someone went
to the System Preferences panel and clicked "change timezone" Might
not always be the case for laptop users who are bouncing around a lot.
and then search java.util.TimeZone for a timezone that has the same
summer and winter DST offsets, then filter that down further by
timezones that switch DST at the amount. This will often give several
possible but equivalent matches. Programmatically solve this by always
choosing one, e.g. the first.
The problem I see with this approach is that it would have to favor
some locale's over others - New York and Buenos Aires might have the
same offset, but which one would appear first in the list? Americans
would be annoyed if Buenos Aires always appeared first because it
begins with B and Argentineans would be annoyed if New York appeared
first just because it's American...
Is the margin of error for IP address tables really that bad? We don't
have to get within a block, just within the general region. I thought
they were ok for that, but don't really have any data to support it
either way.
Bobby
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