[OT] iCal Stupidity

[Niels Meersschaert]

On Sunday, February 16, 2003, at 08:31 AM, Victor Eijkhout wrote:

> Not Ti-related but as Eduard remarked, this list is a community I
> feel at home in.
>
> The latest version of iCal (or maybe I just never noticed it before)
> changes the times on your events if you
> 1/ close it
> 2/ change timezone
> 3/ start it up again.
>
> This is pretty dumb, and it can make you miss flights and
> appointments: if you live on the west coast and make an event for
> your return flight, the time of that flight will change to 3 hours
> later when you are on the other coast. At least if you change your
> timezone, which I do when I'm on travel.

iCal events are built with a your local timezone associated with them, 
so that when you switch timezones, their times are shown in your local 
timezone & thus are shifted from the timezone with which they were set. 
  In the example you give for setting your return flight, the approach 
to use is to change your timezone to your destination time zone.  
Create the return flight event & then switch back to your local 
timezone.  Not pretty, but it fixes the issue you describe.  The other 
approach would be to set the time of the event shifted 3 hours over, 
such that when viewed in the destination local time, it will show 
correctly.

What Apple does need to do is to add in timezone settings within the 
app, so that setting up events like this are easier.  Since some events 
like flights will start in one timezone & end in others, I'd like the 
option to define both start & end timezones.  This won't cause problems 
for duration, but it will possibly be confusing. Say for example that 
you have a flight from New York to LA.  It leaves NY at 3pm & arrives 
in LA at 6pm.  Even though you will have set the ending time as 6pm in 
LA, it will show up in your calendar as lasting from 3pm to 9pm when 
viewing it in Eastern Timezone, since the flight lasts 6 hours.   But 
when you switch to Pacific Timezone, it will properly show your arrival 
time as 6pm, but that you left at noon.  I'm not sure how confusing the 
timezone discrepancy will be to users, so it may make sense to hide the 
timezone options.

I think the limiting factor is icalendar syntax.  At least in the 
current syntax there is no way to define the end time of an event, 
simply the start & duration.  Thus the app would need to interpret the 
starting & ending timezones you enter in the UI and convert them into 
an actual duration.