> I'm more interested in being able to say something like 'Aug 2' or 'next Thursday', the way I can in Google Calendar.

And in Hipmunk.

I just want to note that only americans use the mm/dd/yyyy and that it's pretty non-logical. So no problem outside the US.

The original comment I replied to was suggesting that the date picker was a bad thing. My point is that it's better than any other method, since parsing a date correctly for all people in all situations in the way implied in that post is not possible. There will always be ambiguity over the date if the user chooses to use 'dd/mm/yyyy' or 'mm/dd/yyyy'. Chaking location, or locale isn't much use - we brits go to America on occasion, and they come over here. If you mark it as [dd/mm/yyyy] then you've just limited the usefulness of 'a free-form date that gets parsed smartly'.

I'm from the UK, so if I'm in the US looking to get home, I see the dates the opposite way around? A better way would be to look at the user's locale.

> You would handle that by looking at looking at a user's location settings and choosing the appropriate one.

Great, now if I try to book a flight from Spain to Hungary while being in the US for some reason, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get the one date format which makes no sense whatsoever.