distributedlife

I had a mild moment of panic just before my return home from Adelaide. I had in my head that my plane left at 18:55 and I would arrive at 20:55 and both times were in their respective local times. About 20 minutes before we were supposed to leave for the airport I looked at my phone and it said that my flight left at 18:25, 30 minutes earlier.

We dashed out the door and got to the airport in pretty good time. As soon as I got into the check-in area I saw my flight wasn’t leaving till 19:00; it hadn’t been delayed.

What had happened was back in Canberra I entered my flights into calendar. I entered the times in local because that is what they were given to me as. When I landed in Adelaide a week ago I changed the time zone of my phone, rather than changing the time.

My phone, a Nokia N95, in a burst of helpfulness went through and updated all of my times for the new time zone; it subtracted 30 minutes of all appointments.

I can’t tell if this is a useful feature or not. I can see why it was implemented and how it can be a good idea but without notifying the users at any point it is only going to confuse them.

I suspect it all comes down to whether or not the designers thought that users would change the clock or the time zone. I change the time zone because the time hasn’t changed, just my position in the world. I know plenty of people who would just change the time and they wouldn’t have this problem.

In the end either the option to record times with a time zone included (I can see how this would be tedious) or a message pop up to “not update all times when changing time zones” might be a better solution than silently freakinghelping the user out.