[Design] [Scooby] Managing Calendar/Timezone

[Bobby Rullo]

On Apr 19, 2006, at 1:05 PM, Jeremy Epstein wrote:


> Just to chime in, one thing you might want to take into account is  
> "when" a user would actually care. Personally, If I were making  
> appointments  (even if I knew I were traveling) I would not concern  
> t myself with timezone. -- I would always expect my calendar to be  
> in my "home" time zone, or even better, not care about timezone  
> unless it may cause a conflict such as the two circumstances below:
>
>

I presume you would want your calendar to be in NY time when you  
travelled to NY so you don't have do the mental math of converting  
from PST to EST when looking at your agenda. Also, if I were planning  
events in NY I would want to view things in NY time as well, so as  
not to schedule things at weird times.


> *For me, there are only two circumstances where the timezone I am  
> in matters: *
>    1) if an appointment I am making might conflict with travel  
> across timezones (such as an international flight) This is a very  
> strange case. It means I have an event (airplane flight) that  
> starts in one timezone, and ends in another!
>

Yup.


>    2) if I am planning a conference call across timezones, i.e. if  
> I have a phone meeting with a matthew and bobby.  In the conference  
> call case, I would expect the event to list all the times for all  
> the parties involved: (12:00 noon my calendar time, 2:00pm   
> matthews time)
>
>

Interesting point. I would only want to see this while planning  
though. Otherwise I dont care about what time it is for other people.


> Another example of why I would not want any calendar changing time  
> zones without my explicit control:
>
>

I agree, I would never want that either. The original case was what  
to set the timezone through IP only the first time that someone hits  
Scooby. Scooby is a webapp, and as such has no access to the system's  
timezone, even though you can get the offset through Javascript and a  
3 letter descriptor, which is not enough.

The other scenario that was brought up was when the app noticed that  
you switched timezones somehow, and even then it would ask you, and  
hopefully only once!

Bobby