Storing UTC? There *is* a good case for local time!
Till Adam
till.adam at kdab.com
Tue Dec 21 11:22:29 CET 2010
On Monday 20 December 2010 20:05:21 Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am sure most of you know the following quote:
>
> "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is
> simple, neat, and wrong."
> -- H. L. Mencken
>
> I am afraid, this may apply to some extent to the idea to reduce complexity
> by storing everything in UTC. Allow me to try and explain the situation in
> a new way to help everyone get up to speed.
Point #3: the timezone information has useful additional semantics
As someone who travels reasonably frequently between timezones, I have the
following use case, which is not sufficiently catered to by the existing UTC
only solutions. If I am planing a week in, say, Chicago, I will be making
appointments in local (Chicago) time, for that week. I'll chat with my
customers there three weeks ahead of time, agreeing to meet for steak at
Mortons at 7pm, or for coffee at my favorite Starbucks on Touhy Avenue at 9:30
am. My client (Kontact) allows me to express that, but the appointment is
stored as UTC only, in the Kolab folder. That means that next time I open up
that calendar and appointment, it's shown to me in UTC time, which has no
meaning in the context of me being in Chicago in the week I'm looking at. I
would like to be able to say "I want to meet person A at 10, on the day where
I'm meeting person A at 12", but I can't see the 12 o'clock, because it's
somewhere in the middle of the night in UTC and even if I find it, by scrolling
down, upon selecting it it does not show me when it will happen (in the
context of the location's time). The existing workaround of showing more than
one timezone axis in the agenda view, so I can mentally map that back to the
target time is workable, but for quick, one day trips to Helsinki (which is an
hour off), it's not very practical. So at least I, and my traveling colleagues,
would really like to be able to store "8 am Chicago time next Monday" and be
able to retrieve it from the Kolab storage with all of the information in
there in another client.
This might be a fringe use case for the BSI, but in an international
enterprise context, with conf calls frequently involving people from 3 or 4
time zones, it's a reality we should accomodate.
</soap box>
Till
--
Till Adam | till.adam at kdab.com | Managing Director Germany
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co KG, a KDAB Group company
Tel. Germany +49-30-521325470, Sweden (HQ) +46-563-540090
KDAB - Qt Experts - Platform-independent software solutions
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