I recently ran into first-set-up-calendars-and-then-turn-on-time
zones remorse.
I have 5 calendars. 4 are most definitely in America/Los_Angeles.
1 is a mixture of America/Los_Angeles items and America/New_York
items...all time zone information I happily kept in my head.
But when I went to share my collections, I was advised to turn on
time zones in the interest of providing more accurate data to my
fellow collaborators. Who wouldn't want to do that? But, I was in a
real bind: I could either share all my events in floating time zone,
thereby screwing up other people's calendars...or I could assign a
single time zone to all of my items, which is also inaccurate. What
to do?
We currently have 2 main ways to turn on time zone support which are
inconsistent:
1. File>>Use time zones: Automatically assigns the system's time zone
to your events. Users can change the default time zone from the
calendar view pulldown, but that won't affect the time zones of
individual events.
2. When you Import, Receive, or Subscribe to items that have time
zone information in them OR when you Publish a collection, Chandler
pop-ups a dialog that allows you to choose what time zone you want to
apply to all of your existing events...
I wonder if 2: Allowing users to choose...is more frustrating than
it's worth. Chances are, most of the user's events are intended to
exist in the same time zone that the computer's system clock is set
to...
When we offer user's a choice as to what time zone to assign, we
don't offer them the ability to assign different time zones to
different sets of events...and the lack of that kind of flexibility
is perhaps more frustrating than if they had never been presented
with a choice at all.
I think post-preview, we should consider not giving users a choice
when they first turn on time zones...and addressing the "some-of-my-
stuff-is-in-one-tz-and-some-of-my-stuff-is-in-another-tz" issue with
the ability to multi-select and edit multiple items in a single
detail view.
In the meantime, I've logged a bug against myself to track this
issue: https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9208
Mimi
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