Time Zone Update

It IS a problem: look at the times for your events after Sunday. They are all off by an hour. This is what I noticed first.

James, it's not a few weeks. It's this Sunday.

GlennW: When you turn Set Time Automatically to OFF, it will allow you to change your time zone. So if you click on that setting, and type in Phx (which is annoying for us Tucsonians 🙂) it will be fine. But it won't help if you have to travel, as I do, next week.

Note that there is another problem created by this: events that you add in Calendar on your iPhone will now appear in your Calendar on your computer in Pacific Time. In fact, it would not let me change these events back to MST. I had to change them first to Central, and THEN choose MST. I had about 25 events that I had to change once I realized the problem.

FWIW, I use Google Calendar to manage about fifteen different calendars; when I switched from Android I didn't bother to start using iCal, really, other than just having it pull from Google on those rare occasions when I look at my calendar from my computer (instead of my phone). I'm also using a third-party calendar app (I loathe the stock calendar). So, between pulling my calendars from Google and electing not to use the stock app to interact with them, they (at the moment) seem to be unaffected by the time zone issue. I have a reminder set for DST change day to check whether my time zone issue seems to be fixed, but it doesn't look as if I need to do anything now.

Last year I had the same issue just with my Google Calendar; I had to just start setting things for the time the calendar would say it was so they would show up on my (Android) phone at the right time. It was obnoxious, but it did eventually get fixed. I'm really not happy to be dancing this dance again.

As a side note, doesn't it seem really bizarre that your calendar changed the times of your future meetings, even if it thought the time was changing? I mean, DST or no, 5:00 pm on Tuesday is 5:00 pm on Tuesday; you wouldn't schedule a meeting at 5:00 and suddenly change it to 4:00 just because it's DST...??? Strange, nonsensical behavior. Fix it, Apple. I mean, Apple products are supposed to 'just work', are they not? Get on it.

I just looked at my untouched stock calendar app, and it shows the right time for my scheduled events. Maybe it has to do with using Google Calendars? If so, that's a pretty sad statement.

They are showing the right time now, because MST and PDT are the same, but they are in Pacific time. For events next week the time will be off by an hour.

Maybe I read wrong, but I thought you said that future events were showing in the calendar as an hour different than they should. I was saying that my calendar is not exhibiting that behavior; all of my future events through February, as far as I could see without checking every individual item, seem to still be in the right time slots in my calendar without me having to change anything. That's not to say that the time zone thing isn't a problem, because it really, really will be, in a big way, but I was just saying that my calendar does not seem to be affected. Yet. I keep praying that it's just an obnoxious Apple thing to set all PST/PDT users to Cupertino, and when we are no longer in PST/PDT, then it will allow us to have our own time zone back. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

I had no problem changing them to Mountain Time on my Mac. But there is no way of doing this on an iPhone or iPad that I know of. It's really important to go through every event you've created since upgrading to iOS 5 to make sure it has the right time zone.

What time zone is listed in the event, and what time zone is set on the device you're checking future events on? If they're the same the time will be right. If they're different it may be wrong.

It's not that simple. 5:00 WHERE? You may always stay in one place and only have meetings with people who live next door, but for those of us who travel or work with people on the other side of the world being able to work with events in different time zones is important. Internally time is kept as UTC (GMT for the traditional) and adjusted for display depending on your time zone setting. This isn't to excuse Apple; they need to do a better job of time zone management. But to cut them a little slack, it's not a trivial problem.

Thanks for the tip. I did check all of the events coming up in the next couple of weeks, but I figure I'll leave the rest until after the 6th hits the fan. Maybe that's practical of me, maybe it's lazy, I dunno. I do know that all of the events I've created in my phone show up properly on my online calendar, so for right now, they seem to be syncing with Google properly. I haven't bothered with iCal, but I suppose I could open it up and see what it does. My biggest concern is whether I will be able to leave the phone set to automatic time/date; I travel a lot, and also, I'm worried the phone will lose time if I don't have it automatically pulling from the server. That's not gonna work.

I'm with you, man. I didn't say it was trivial; it's a REALLY big deal to me. I was merely pointing out that, if you put an event in your calendar at 5:00 pm Tuesday, then it would still be at 5:00 pm on Tuesday after the time change, it's just that 5:00 pm would come later in actual time. So why change the event, as recorded in the calendar, if you haven't moved into a different time zone physically? It doesn't make logical sense; yeah, it should change times if you find yourself in a new time zone, but the entire point of DST is to functionally move 5:00 around. Changing your recorded times when the time changes sorta defeats the entire purpose, doesn't it? Otherwise, wouldn't everyone who observes DST suddenly start work at 8:00 instead of 9:00 when the time changed?

And, for the record, I do keep meetings with people in many different time zones (including Europe), so I'm aware of the coordination issue. For our purposes, we have a standard business time zone that we all reference from (adjusting in our own calendars as needed). This glitch is going to add another layer of complication to that process, for sure; I'm in the "Fix it NOW" camp right with everyone else.

LnGwStX:

If you are using Google Calendar, maybe this isn't affecting you. And if you are in Pacific time, it's not affecting you. BUT if you are using iCal on a Mac and it is set to MST, the events that were set in Pacific time appear an hour LATER in the iMac calendar, because starting Monday, 4 p.m. PST will be 5 p.m. MST.

Does that help?

Thanks for the breakdown. I am in AZ, so I am on Mountain time, except when I'm not (right now). Every menu I've ever encountered to choose my time zone from has a second, AZ-specific Mountain Time entry, so I'm not 100% sure of what our official time zone is called, but I do know we follow GMT -7 year-round. That's about all I know about time zones, having lived my whole life as a resident of the Grand Canyon state.

So, in essence, this glitch does NOT seem to be affecting my calendar events since I don't use iCal and have chosen not to have iTunes sync with iCal on my computer (iCal syncs separately by pulling events down from GCal, as does my phone). But it WILL affect my entire schedule after Nov 6th, if it is indeed a bug and not just an annoying feature of Apple's arrogance that will right itself automatically. If my phone continues to follow Cupertino time after the change, then I will have to either set the time manually or else remember to add an hour to the time, neither of which options is very appealing, given both the iPhone's propensity for losing time when not automatically pulling it from the network and my distaste for extraneous mental gymnastics.

Either way, I hope Apple sees fit to fix it sooner rather than later; I see enough iPhones around me that, surely, there is enough of a customer base in an entire state to warrant immediate attention to the issue. Sadly, it is a numbers game, after all.

BuffCrone wrote:

LnGwStX:

If you are using Google Calendar, maybe this isn't affecting you. And if you are in Pacific time, it's not affecting you. BUT if you are using iCal on a Mac and it is set to MST, the events that were set in Pacific time appear an hour LATER in the iMac calendar, because starting Monday, 4 p.m. PST will be 5 p.m. MST.

Does that help?