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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

That’s what annoys me about google calendar and most others. When I schedule an appointment most of the times it will be for the time zone i will be in at the time of the appointment. So when I travel and agree to meet people at 10 I want to enter it that way. But in most calendar apps everything gets shifted around as soon as I arrive at the new location. I would much prefer to have apps not shift stuff around unless I explicitly tell the app to do it.

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Google Calendar does let you set the time zone in the 'More options' view, FWIW. I use it occasionally.

I know. But I want no time zone. When I plan my Germany trip next week I want to see the 10 am meeting there at 10 regardless of where I am.

It should operate like a good old paper calendar.

Google Calendar is built around notifications and coordination, which both require an agreed upon "actual" time.

The feature set you're looking for sounds more like an "agenda" to me.

I think what he wants is that the software defers asking for a time zone until the item relates to two users who have different timezone.

And that if the event arrives without having touched users in different timezones, then the software should infer that the event's timezone is the local timezone of all users at that point in time and space.

What I would like is to to be able to set my "local time schedule" and be able to do it in advance. So for example if I am traveling next week I can indicate that my local time will change.

This is great not only for me but also for other people trying to schedule events in my calendar.

With Gmail picking up flight and hotel confirmations this could even be mostly automatic.

Its not that you want no time zone, you want to mark the appointment as "local" time. That could be useful, though I expect it would create as many problems as it solves.

The explicit timezone is crucial for conference calls that cross timezones. That is at least half of the appointments on my calendar (I coordinate projects between the US, Europe and Asia).

For international phone meetings this is good but for travel it’s really bad.

I still disagree. I also travel a lot, and I set the meetings in the timezone where the meeting is. It's not a paper calendar.

Right. When I travel I usually have a combination of physical meetings in local time and phone calls back home or spanning multiple time zones. I do mess up sometimes but I’m not sure how much you can automate.

> It should operate like a good old paper calendar.

In that case, you enter a recurring 10 am conference call every Monday, and the moment you move timezones you miss the call.

The problem really is (as mentioned in this thread) that the user's intent is not known.

There are two use cases: one is for meetings with participants in different timezones. Gcal does this well. There other use case is travel. For this the current system is not very good.

Well, you know the timezone: it's of wherever in Germany the meeting will take place.

I think the problem is the display: since you know you'll be in Germany from date X to Y, you should be able to configure the presentation timezone for those days (which would also show you those meetings in the local time when you'll have to make them).

Most people have more events that happen at a particular instant but different local times (e.g. phone calls between people in different timezones) than events that happen at a fixed local time but different instants. When I'm planning my trip to Germany I certainly don't want it showing all my calls at the wrong time.

The iCalendar standard does actually support that, but perhaps Google Calendar's UI does not. I suspect it does work internally, because it interoperates with iCalendar fairly well.

The standard calls it a "floating" DATE-TIME:

"The recipient of an iCalendar object with a property value consisting of a local time, without any relative time zone information, SHOULD interpret the value as being fixed to whatever time zone the "ATTENDEE" is in at any given moment."

I think what you want, at least on the mobile Google Calendar app is under:

Settings - General - Use device time zone

If you disable this, you'll keep everything pinned to your preferred timezone.

But I'm pretty sure a better approach is to select the timezone of the event. If it is at 10am in Germany, why not tell your calendar about this? Sure, this is an extra step, but it is part of the event's parameters (as pointed out in the OP).

For that you would like to have an explicit "local time zone" option. I had recently similar in application I am developing, with datetime of which we are not sure in which time zone they are. That information might arrive later.

On my Palm Pilot there was a “floating” time zone that behaved like this. But I can’t find this feature in any modern app. Outlook doesn’t have it either.

Apple's calendar has it on macOS, but not on iOS... (it's annoying how mobile everything always has to be so neutered)

And yet iOS calendar is also more powerful in that you can set different time zones on the start and end of a single event, which macOS calendar will show but not let you edit.

Paper calendar/planners don't have this problem. That's why I still use them.

There's a workaround, which is that you can set a time zone for an event in GCal.

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