Fiji Timezone and Timezones in general

Apple have always been poor with providing adequate times zones.
The best you can do is choose Wellington, but as that has daylight savings in play at the moment and Suva does not, also click back to the Date and Time tab, and uncheck Set date and time automatically, and manually set the clock back one hour.

You can send them a message from this site;
http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html

roam wrote:
You can send them a message from this site;
http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html

Actually that is more for website comments

The bug report address is
https://bugreport.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/RadarWeb.woa/wa/signIn

Message was edited by: nerowolfe

Thanks for input nerowolfe, but It is not really a bug, rather it is just an absent feature.

That tiny little map of the world that you have to click on, to pick your time zone is inadequate.
It would be better to have an extra detail button, where you could select your capital/regional city and then the time zone and daylight saving could be dragged off some server.
(DST varies because even on the same longitude, the temperate latitudes tend to have DST, whereas for the equatorial latitudes DST is meaningless and hence not made).

As it stands you have to make the adjustment manually. So Mac is not actually misbehaving, it is just missing that ability. It's been like this for years.

Message was edited by: roam

franckmartin wrote:
What is funny is that at the OS level, all the timezones are there:
/usr/share/zoneinfo/
but at the GUI level they tried to associate timezones with cities and there are many timezones that do not have an associated city.

Is there a particular one you would like to see in the GUI?

Take a look at this topic, where we managed (in Tiger) to put Lord Howe island into the list 😉

Michael Conniff wrote:

Take a look at this topic, where we managed (in Tiger) to put Lord Howe island into the list

It would be this topic.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=7530118&#7530118

+M.C, your creativity is fascinating as usual.+

Hmm … forgot the link, did I? Can only plead that it was getting late 😉

Your suggestion whet my appetite, so I had to find the link. Very useful.

roam wrote:
Your suggestion whet my appetite, so I had to find the link. Very useful.

Well I guess you would have more chance of knowing where Lord Howe Island was than most people (including me 😉 )

All I can find for Fiji is Suva, the capital. Standard time zone: UTC/GMT +12 hours, no daylight saving time in 2008. In fact, no DST since 2000.

Time zone abbreviation FJT. Latitude: 18° 08' South, Longitude: 178° 25' East .

OK, here you are. This works just fine on my machine. Just make sure the Date & Time preference pane is unlocked (I'm not even sure that's necessary, but …).

DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK. I have tested it, and the commands back up anything important, but I am not at your machine. You should have a full backup anyway. It won't necessarily keep the original file if you do it more than once.

Open the Terminal (from /Applications/Utilities) and copy and paste the following into the Terminal window, one line at a time, with a return after each line:

sudo -s
umask 0002; ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific/Fiji /etc/localtime
cd /System/Library/PreferencePanes/DateAndTime.prefPane/Contents/Resources/TimeZone.prefPane/Contents/Resources/
mv allcitiesadj.plist allcitiesadj.plist.orig
sed '/^</arr/,$c
 <array>
 <string>-18.1333333</string>
 <string>178.4166667</string>
 <string>28</string>
 <string>Fiji/Suva</string>
 <string>FJ</string>
 <string>Suva</string>
 <string>Fiji</string>
 </array>
</array>
</plist>
' allcitiesadj.plist.orig > allcitiesadj.plist
exit

After the first command, you will be prompted for your password. This is not echoed back (not even asterisks) for security reasons: just type it and press return. During the edit command, sed, you will see secondary prompt characters, ">" at the start of each line to remind you the command is not complete

Of course any Apple system update involving the Date & Time preference pane is likely to overwrite this, so save these instructions 😉

Thanks for the instructions. They work for all but one application I have. I've done this modification for my own location. My location is already in the zoneinfo database. However, since neither the city nor the country were in the date&time settings, I also modifying Localized_Cities.strings and Localized_Countries.strings to add them.

From what I can tell, everything in OS X works with these modifications. The time and date are correct, the /private/etc/localtime points to a real zoneinfo file, "date" in the terminal works. I also verified the 2 digit country code.

Unfortunately, my FineReader for ScanSnap software crashes when I set my Date&Time to this customized time. We really use this software, so I'd like to get it working with my custom timezone. As it stands, we have to set our timezone to one of the existing, non-custom ones.

Since the crash is in the software's library, I've contacted the software provider and am waiting for a response. In the meantime, could there be another configuration file that may need to be tweaked?

The crash log stack contains:
7 libFREngine.dylib 0x079181b9 FObj::GenerateInternalError(FObj::TInternalErrorType, wchar_t const*, wchar_t const*, wchar_t const*, long, unsigned long) + 1143
8 libFREngine.dylib 0x07bff248 SystemTimeToFileTime + 226
9 libFREngine.dylib 0x083dcf1f FObj::CTime::CTime(int, int, int, int, int, int, int, int) + 181

Message was edited by: togmahon

Message was edited by: togmahon