1. On Timezones and Calendars

    I’m super excited to be heading to SXSW Interactive in just over a weeks time. It’s the first time I’ll have been to SXSW, Austin or Texas - hell, it’s the first time in six years that I won’t have been to California when visiting the USA - however there’s one perennial thorn in my side with this trip: building a calendar for a different timezone. For Macworld 2008, Mike Rose and I attempted to build a common calendar (using Google Calendar) that would show everything we needed to cover for TUAW. However we instantly ran into mind-boggling, timezone-baffling, confusion.

    See, in order to keep my borderline-OCD-for-keeping-things-proper happy, I set the timezone of this new (specific) calendar to Pacific time. I then proceeded to add events to the calendar. Of course, I added them at the time they would take place at in Pacific time, but was entering them using my own Google account: one that was set to use my timezone (GMT). We later discovered this meant that any events I added to Google Calendar were stored on the PST-zoned calendar as occurring 8 hours prior to the time I’d entered.

    However, before realising this, Mike (based in New York, and on EST) would log into Google Calendar, see that the events were appearing 5 hours earlier than expected, and change their times to be the ones we’d agreed over email. I’d log in, and of course event times would be five hours later than I’d entered. In short, it was a disaster. I don’t at all mind the maths involved in calculating different event times, however when you’re wanting to quickly add an event to a calendar, it can well and truly shaft your planning.

    The same is happening in my attempts to plan for SXSW. The not entirely great my.SXSW site (I’m here) provides a CalDAV link for you to subscribe to - and rightly applies a CST timezone (GMT-6) as that’s where the events will be. However when I’m talking to people via email and wanting to look at my schedule to fix up things for the week, it’s nothing short of infuriating to have the events displayed at the time they would be happening, were I in Brighton.

    I fully understand that timezones for calendars are fantastic when you want to avoid doing timezone maths and co-ordinate meetings. But for me to plan a week in Austin, the lack of timezone-agnostic calendars - because, ultimately, I need it to be simply 1600 on Friday 13th March, not 1600CST on Friday 13th - is a complete pain in the arse.

    Posted on Sunday March 1st, 2009