The calendar thing is working correctly. Every event has a time zone attached, even if you didn't notice it or change it. If your appointments involved other people and you had sent out calendar invites, they would have noticed the wrong time.
Only from a stubborn, technical perspective. It's obviously not working as intended for GP. It should be easy to create "local timezone" events on Apple devices, and it isn't.
In fact, I'm thinking of pretty much all my events in local timezones. A concert at 8pm. Meeting someone for a coffee at 2pm. Flight departure times. Taking pills at 7am in the morning. Having people in other timezones involved is the exception for me, not the default.
There are many ways how you could implement a nice UI for that, and Apple offers none.
This doesn’t look possible on the iOS/iPadOS Calendar apps.
As far as "floating," it says: "To keep the event from moving when you view a different time zone, choose Floating."
When I VIEW a different time zone? Does this also mean when I'm IN a different time zone?
Anyway... I will have to create a dummy "floating" appointment on my Mac before my next trip and see what the phone does with it when I get there. But it sure seems like this setting needs to exist on the mobile devices too...
The timezone picker in the window titlebar defaults to your system’s current timezone. When you create an event, the start and end times for that event default to the window’s current timezone.
You can use the newly-revealed picker in the inspector to change the timezone of an event. There is a single picker that alters both the start and end time. If you set this to something other than the timezone chosen in the window’s titlebar, the event will move to reflect when it will occur in the window’s timezone.
I am personally convinced this is what people want 99% of the time, and I think it’s silly that you have to check a checkbox in Calendar Settings to get it. It’s fairly common to receive details for an event in another timezone, such as a conference call or vacation. I live with Time Zone Support enabled on all my Macs, and while I rarely touch the timezone picker in the titlebar I make frequent use of the timezone picker when setting the event details window.
There’s one special option in the event details timezone picker: “Floating”. This tells Calendar to always reckon the start and end times in the timezone selected in the window’s titlebar. So if you create an event that starts at 7am and set its timezone to “Floating”, the event will always be shown to begin at 7am even if you change your system’s timezone or the timezone in the titlebar. I don’t use this feature much, but it’s useful for plotting out your daily routine. If you go for at 6am every day, regardless of where you are on the planet, you can create a floating “Daily Run” event that starts at 6am and doesn’t shift as you travel.
The iPhone version of calendar is designed differently. There is no “Time Zone Support” checkbox on iPhone. The event details view always shows time zone pickers for both the start and end times. This lets you create an event with the start and end times specified in local times in different timezones. I use this feature for every single flight I take, and I always have to enter them on my phone because the Mac doesn’t let you set the start and end timezones independently.
But the iPhone doesn’t let you choose Floating in the time zone picker, so you can’t use it to create daily-routine events. Thankfully, all versions of Calendar preserve the data and behavior of events created on any platform, so you can create your Floating events in a Mac and your timezone-spanning flights on an iPhone and they will render as expected on the other device, including the Event Details window.
As far as what people want most of the time, I would submit that way more than 99% of the time they want the appointment to start when the digits of the clock on their phone show a particular time... anywhere in the world.
And leave it to Apple to bury and obfuscate the option that supports the most-typical use case, with this "floating" setting. It also requires an extra step, every. damned. time. And of course it's asinine to omit the option from the devices on which it's arguably most important: MOBILE ones.
Final nitpick: Appointments don't show timezones when you look at them on iOS or the Mac. Even with "time zone support" turned on.
Time zone: Local
was exactly what I came up with.
The absurd thing about Apple's approach is, as you point out, that it serves the tiny minority of use cases. Who the hell looks up the time zone of everything they're going to do when they're traveling around? I just want it to use the time shown on the phone!
(No need to look up the timezone.)
I agree that calendar’s UI is a bit of a tire fire. One of Apple’s core UI design tenants is that you should be continuously surprised and delighted when you use iPhone, and then share your discoveries with friends to build up an Apple user community.
I don’t want the phone to surprise and delight me, or hide major features like a 1990’s microsoft excel easter egg.
For instance, why in the hell are “magnifier” and “scan + ocr document to pdf” not in the camera app?
Because a lot of people intuitively think a camera is different to a magnifying glass or a scanner.
Ha ha ha, I do remember this catchphrase and it so perfectly sums up what's wrong with a lot of Apple (and, to be fair, other) UI today. I want to get shit done, not play with an Advent calendar.
Friendly FYI: The word you're looking for is TENETS. Tenants would be renting space, and I haven't received any checks yet.
Actually, not true... those AAPL dividends might count.
I don't have an iPhone to check with but what I mean is that the time of an appointment should be displayed as 9:00 AM PST and people flying from NYC to LA should always see 9:00 AM PST when they are in NYC, at any mile of the flight and at destination.
Your 5pm London event happens when it's 12pm in NYC.
I don't want my calendar changing appointment times on me. If I say 7pm when I'm in Istanbul, I expect it to alert at 7pm when I'm in Istanbul, 8pm if I'm in Dubai, 9pm if I'm in Karachi, and 1am if I'm in Izakaya. Entering it without a timezone should reasonably default to the timezone the calendar was in when the appointment was entered.
Let's take an example: suppose I have a calendar appointment to call my partner, at 7pm Istanbul time. I'm in Istanbul, and I enter 7pm with the "floating" scheduling method. Then, I travel to New Zealand, and at 7pm NZ time, alarm goes off, so I call my partner. Unfortunately, it is 9am in Istanbul, not 7pm: the floating screwed up the schedule. Including timezone in the appointment would have prevented this issue.
Let's take another example: you're in Istanbul, traveling to one of your company's remote offices in NZ for a week for a summit, and have your agenda set out in "floating" time according to NZ timezone. Then, a storm rolls in, and you can't fly out, so you'll attend the same appointments remotely. But now you must edit each and every appointment to reflect their new "floating" time according to Istanbul. Including timezone in the appointments would have prevented this issue.
I want it shown to me at my local time, so I'm prepared without having to care what offset they are.
If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
The unfortunate truth is that there’s no simple UI fix for this problem. Even if the phone could infer or just be told where you will be in the future, there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone.
If you travel for work a lot, you come up with your own way of dealing with this stuff. If you travel for work rarely, you’re going to be confused and frustrated no matter what.
If you add an event while in London that is going to happen in New York at 7pm NY time, you set it at "7pm".
So you see it as "7pm event" while in London - but you know e.g. that this 7pm event concerns your visit to the Mets game in NY.
Then, when you land in New York and the timezone changes, you still see them as 7pm. What you entered is interpreted by default as a timezone-less absolute time. The same if, while in NYC, you set a feature 11pm event that will happen in London. When you get to London, it shows as an 11pm event.
Now, if the event you want to set needs coordination with different people, it could have a toggle like "tag with local timezone" or allow to set an explicit one, and then another toggle to "translate to local timezone to the people you're sharing this with". So, as I wrote above, in that case:
"If it's 2pm for them and that's 5pm for me, I want to see "Meeting: 5pm" at my calendar, not "Meeting: 2pm <some other place timezone>".
And they, of course, should see "Meeting: 2pm" on theirs.
>there’s not one obvious model for representing times across time zones in a way that will make sense to everyone.
Sure there is. UTC. It's just laziness that doesn't have people adopt it.
Shared events should be shown in UTC, and next to it, your local translated time of that (and the name of the place of timezone). Then an easy selector to see it translated to any other timezone.
So why on earth should anyone have to tediously select the destination time zone (which is not shown by default in appointments on iOS or Mac) for EVERY appointment, every time, when you nearly always want to refer to the time SHOWN ON THE PHONE? Come on, this scenario is absurd.