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Comment by PunksATawnyFill | Hacker News Reader

Even worse: Apple's "time-zone support" in their iOS calendar, which changes the times of your appointments behind your back.

If you buy plane tickets and then enter the dates and times in Calendar... Apple will change them without telling you if you travel through time zones. AS IF ANYONE ENTERS TIMES LIKE THAT.

If I have a meeting in London next week at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, I'm not going to sit here in the U.S. and do the math so I can enter the meeting time at some crazy hour to "fool" Calendar.

DEAR APPLE: WE WANT THE ALARM TO GO OFF WHEN THE CLOCK ON THE PHONE SAYS THE TIME FOR WHICH I SET THE ALARM.

This is NOT an option on iPhones currently. Unfuckingbelievable: https://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2016/03/apples-idiotic-time-...

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If I have a meeting in London next week at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, I'm not going to sit here in the U.S. and do the math so I can enter the meeting time at some crazy hour to "fool" Calendar.

I used to have this problem. I don't know if Apple fixed it or I just got used to doing it the Apple way. I think it helped to enter flights and appointments on the computer where there was more screen space to grok what was going on.

The key seems to be making sure to set the local time zone for both the departure and arrival locations. And if you need an alarm, to set it to "3 hours before" the appointment, rather than at some assumed local time.

I used to have the same problem you describe, but haven't had it in several years, even for flights and appointments across the International Date Line.

The best approach seems to be making a date+time either "timezone aware" or "naive" (I got this from python's datetime.)

Naive dates don't have a timezone attached, so of course there's no auto conversion. Aware times do.

Now all you have to do is avoid assuming which your user wants. Especially avoid an interface that makes it look like they have a naive date when they actually have an aware one.

For example, if the appointment is timezone-aware, then write the timezone next to it! So if the user writes 10:00 and you auto-convert that and print 10:00 EST, they at least have a chance to correct it.

Respectfully, the current behavior is absolutely correct - associate a calendar entry with a time zone (and make it simple to adjust which time zone it is). Not doing this would make re-occurring meetings challenging to attend the moment you travel across a time zone, or when you invite people who are in a different time zone (such as international).

Personally, I do this kind of travel 4-5 times a year for work, and I am quite happy I don't have to add obscure time zone math on the top of an already disrupted mental state.

Time representations, especially for something as essential to modern life as a calendar, should be precise. Apple and Google's versions are precise.

I have no idea how good this app is, but the author, David Smith, is a long time, well known, Indy iOS developer.

He just released CalZones for just this reason. It’s a paid up front, no ads, no subscriptions app.

http://david-smith.org/blog/2019/04/17/introducing-calzones-...

He talks about it in the Under the Radar podcast.

https://www.relay.fm/radar/163

I never thought of this, but if it behaved as you suggest I would be raging the same! I work with teams across multiple timezones so I generally assume I need to adjust the time to convert to where it would appear on a local calendar. The only time I’ve been burned by this is the google “auto crest calendar entry” feature that put a show start time in the wrong time zone.

The obvious way to handle this would be to set the appointment for either the current timezone, or the timezone where the appointment takes place. Simple checkbox/radio button, pick a default, but let the user change that default.

heh, that would never have happened on my lineage smart brick, were the alarm app just goes to sleep as well. Certainly a most non-invasive app..

But yeah, this seems to be a bad design decision.

Let us meet in 4 hours in a different time zone doesn't seem to be a likely scenario. And even then it wouldn't make that much sense.

Google Calendar is also guilty of this nonsense, I missed a flight exactly for this reason.

At least for Google Calendar, it's pretty easy to avoid the mental math by using the built-in time zones. You can select the time zone when creating the event[0].

[0] https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064

iOS does this, too. There's and entry for "time zone" immediately beneath the time setting spinny thing.

I came very close to missing a flight because of this too. It's ridiculous.

"Siri, remind me about appointment on tuesday next week at 10 am london time"

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