Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Notification of Calendar Events

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Posted by Eduardo Pérez on
The worst problem with timezones is schedules. This problem is caused because of the daylight savings (DST).

This is the scenario:
"weekly Friday meeting at 08:00" (The user's timezone is Central Europe, this means +0100 in Winter and +0200 in Summer)

So, what does this mean? (Two cases)
· The daylight savings in effect are from the timezone of the originator user. So there are weekly Friday meeting at 07:00 UTC in _winter_ and at 06:00 UTC in _summer_. This would favor Europeans (and other people with daylight savings), since European Union official schedules are supposed to change in summer to save energy.
· There's no daylight savings. So there are weekly Friday meeting at 06:00 UTC in _winter_ and in _summer_, since the appointment was setup in summer. This would favor international users with other daylight savings or no
daylight savings at all.

This means the user should be able to address this problem selecting the timezone the schedule is to be set up.

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Posted by Dirk Gomez on
Eduardo you are certainly right - I was just aiming at a solution which is feasible now: a reminder needs to be sent prior to an event and I would have the user choose the proper time (including the proper offset to the server's timezone).

What we need is mock-ups that show a tiemzone-aware user interface which is *not* confusing and reasonably easy to use. Someone got a proposal?