Calendars Don't Work

I am totally frustrated with dumbness of calendars. On all levels.

First of all, why do we use a base 12 hour system? 60 seconds in a minute, and 24 hours a day? Can we go decimal, please? I thought the beat time was a good idea, especially as it solved the time zone issue -- no time zones in beat time, just a thousnad 'beats' per day -- but it will never catch on.

So I am resigned to 24 hours, 7 days a week (don't get me started), and time zones.

But in that case, shouldn't our calendar tools work? They just don't, at least not if you travel.

For example, I can turn on the time zone features of iCal, which allows me to attribute an appointment with a time relative to a time zone. But then everything falls apart if you use it. I plan to fly from Dulles to Oakland, leaving at 6.05 am, landing at 10.30am. The reservation info is provided that way, but the appointment only allows a single time zone for the appointment. So I could, I suppose, mentally transpose the 10.30am landing time to be 1.30pm ET, but then the display screws up. And when I set up appointments in CA when I am in VA, I would have to similarly transpose everything, even though I actually plan to be in CA for the meetings. This means you see a meeting at 1pm (ET) when it really will be taking place at 10am (PT) when you get there. Very confusing.

The answer? Apple and other calendar makers need to provide finer grained control for appointments: time zones for start and finish, and a display time zone control. While I am in VA, I may want to display all events 'localized' -- relative to the time zone I am currently in -- or 'globalized' where everything is displayed in its own time zone.

Things get even worse when I try to change time zones on my Mac. I land in CA, set the time zone to PT, and all the times on my calendar, which I have not transposed, move three hours. Likewise my cell phone, if I use the automatic time zone features.

So, I have reverted to manual control of all my time-based devices. I turn off time-zone support in iCal, and adjust time and date manually on my Mac and my cell phone (at least when traveling out of ET). Because calendars don't work. At least not for travelers.

tags: calendaring

Comments

[J. Lasser]

In addition to timezone support in iCal, there are "floating" appointments --- appointments whose start and end times are independent of the timezone.
This solves the airplane problem you discuss, if you turn time zones on and use them religiously.

[Colin Donald]

Hi Stowe,

That all made me laugh in agreement - I'm still looking for an online open-source calendar/CMS that I could use to display the correct dates and times by time zone for the global users here at my Live Net Music site www.livenetmusic.com

For a nice implementation of this kind of thing (I think in Flash), see www.fabchannel.com

As scheduled content becomes more widespread online, I think there will be a real demand for this (and of course syncing in with the user's various calendars on their multiple devices).

[Stowe Boyd]

J -

As the help for iCal states, floating events still have the problem of being displayed ounterintuitively: "The event's time zone affects where it appears on the calendar. For example, if the iCal time zone is set to San Francisco, California, and you create a lunch event at noon and then set its time zone to Paris, France, the event will move nine hours back in the main calendar view. When you travel to Paris and change the iCal time zone to Paris, the event will appear at noon again." So, yes, I know that I can do what you suggest, but whne I am sitting in SF and look at next weeks calendar for Paris, it looks like I am planning to have lunch at 5 in the afternoon.

What I guess I'd like is to be able to assert a time zone -- next Mon-Fri I will be in Paris -- and then create and view events in the obvious way. It should be a property of the period of time, not each stupid event.

And of course, cell phones and other devices would have to play nice, too.

[FLOATING Need]

These two quotes are from the Apple Forums - my problem is IDENTICAL to these gentlemen:

"Hi all,
I'm just a guy who recently migrated from Palm Desktop and who doesn't like to be in Madrid, for example, only to see his Chicago appointments listed seven hours ahead. I've been managing time zones in my head my whole life and don't really need or want iCal to "help" me out with it.
That said, does anyone know of a script available or other method that will allow one to change all events in iCal to "floating"? I would prefer to not have to do this one event at a time.
Thanks much for your thoughts and insight.
MacBook Mac OS X (10.4.7)
tonyhj

Posts: 4
Registered: Sep 9, 2006
Re: Question re. converting multiple events to floating time zone
Posted: Sep 9, 2006 4:25 PM in response to: Ryan Grub

I'm glad this topic is here, and sad that it hasn't generated any useful replies in almost 20 days! I really had to dig before I found this unanswered question!

I've posted my own - somewhat comparable - problem and possibly someone will notice and answer. My question, posted Sept 9, is entitled "Can I disable 'time zone' actions done by iCal?"
____________________________

Does ANYONE have a solution for this? How to GLOBALLY set ALL EVENTS (or at least all events in a given Calendar) to FLOATING, including RETROACTIVELY???

iCal 2.0.5, Powerbook G4, OS X 10.4.9

Thanks! :D