Hi Katie, > I read your motivation for re-opening the discussion as: people who > implement calendaring standards for a living don't grok the end user > motivation for having a calendar with floating events. I don't see this > as a good reason to revisit the design, especially right before Preview. > Also, I've heard feedback from Mitch and other users he's talked to that > the timezone design is spot on, and does a great job of supporting the > two types of calendar travelers.
That's entirely fair. I don't really want to make more pre-Preview work for anyone. > I do understand that the floating events provide a problem for > free-busy. More below. It's not actually freebusy I'm worried about, it's no-tz people sharing with timezone users, and no-tz users transitioning to using timezones. But you speak to that below. > My understanding from Mimi, Priscilla, Mitch and others is that we see > two distinct types of people-who-use-calendars-in-different-timezones, > (a) the do-the-math-in-the-head people and (b) the > explicitly-track-timezones people. The one group tends to not understand > why the other group would do it that way, but both types of users really > do exist. Intellectually I believe it when I hear this, but at a gut level I guess I can't escape from being a (b), much as I've tried. I'm glad we have people to weigh in who can grok both groups. > It is true that the do-the-math-in-the-head people in some sense are not > playing nice if they try and share with the set-the-timezone people. I > think that just is what it is -- the user's preferred behavior isn't > great for people who need to coordinate across timezones. If users > really need to coordinate across timezones, the one user needs to ask > the other user to use timezones to make it work, imho. OK. That does, in fact, settle me down. I tend to forget that conflicting systems don't HAVE to be harmonized, I agree it's OK for out-of-band communication to resolve ambiguity. I can see how group (a) folks can share with one another coherently. To focus in: My worry has been about one person collaborating casually with someone in a different geographic area, without realizing they're in a different area. But I guess that's not terribly likely, casual collaborator doesn't mean stranger. > In other words, I'm not in favor of altering the design here. I think we > need to try the current design out with real users, and go from there. I'm still somewhat worried about the collision of these paradigms, once we've got floating events floating about in Cosmo. But it seems reasonable that my (b) hindbrain just can't see that it'll all work out smoothly. Thanks for the back and forth, I'll go back to trying to solve problems we haven't already come to agreement on. :) Sincerely, Jeffrey _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
