Time Zone Support is STUPID!!!!!

"Floating" . . . setting each event to "Floating" is the way I keep the time correct . . . the time in the time zone where the event will be occurring, not some other time zone where I may be when reading my iCal calendar.

Apple should make "Floating" an option that can be set as a default.

As it is now, each time I enter an event, I need to set the time to Floating; it would be nice if this were done for me automatically, which a default setting could do.

mesh-arch: Given that I spend my days delevoping a Calendar app, I'm always thinking about the philosphy of time :-) So, you're probably right - I'm giving a more "engineery" type response because that's my world. For the record, I totally get the issue you are describing (and, in fact, have been bitten by it myself a couple times). Unfortunately, it's not one that there are easy solutions for because at some level, if you remove the burden of the user specifying the "intended" time zone, you are almost requiring that the Calendar app be able to read your mind....among other issues, a calendar app has no way to know if a given event actually involves people in other time zones. For instance - let me tweak your scenario: While you are still in EST, your wife says "be sure to call little Johnny every night before he goes to bed at 8pm". So, you put a 15 minute phone call on your calendar at 8pm for every night that you'll be in San Francisco. Once you hit SF, however, that appointment now changes to 8pm PST and you end up calling your son at 11pm his time.

So there's the rub - how does a calendar app know which events it should "shift" and which ones it shouldn't? Probably the best solution I've seen for this would be what I mentioned in my previous post..Google Calendar (and our calendar app for that matter :-)) support the ability to lock a single calendar into a given time zone. That way - it's exactly what you want: your dinner appointment shows up at the same time regardless what time zone you are currently in (and you are implicitly telling the calendar app that everything enter on this calendar is in time zone X and that you always want to pretend like you are in time zone X when you look at events on this calendar). In the above scenario, you'd schedule dinner appointments on your San Francisco calendar, but you'd put Johnny's phone call on your "home" calendar and everything works magically (unfortunately, Apple's calendar doesn't support this feature...).

Barring solutions like that, however, you'll keep bumping into problems where the calendar app simply doesn't know key information to do its job, like: where will you actually be during a given event, will this event ever be sent out as a meeting request to other people, is your calendar is being shared by people in other time zones, etc, etc...it has to be ready for any scenario, and that is why it's requiring you to be specific. The trick is finding a solutions that abstract the time zone complexity away from the user while still allowing the calendar to perform all its time zone-specific duties (firing alarms at the right time, sharing calendar data with others, etc) -- those aren't always easy solutions to come by.

pinkfloyd1969: The "fixed" option does exist in Apple's calendar app. With time zone support turned on, you can schedule events in a "floating" time zone -- which means the calendar will update those events (and alerts) whenever you change time zones so that the event (and alert) preserve their "time" in the local time zone. In my previous post, I mentioned some of the evils of floating time zones, but if you are willing to live with the limitations (and dangers) of them, that might be the way to go. One thing to keep in mind -- since you are binding those events to the "current calendar time zone", when you fly somewhere and update your time zone on your laptop, you also need to update your calendar's time zone as well so that the alarms on your floating events update to the local time zone...also - keep in mind that in our ever-connected world (where I'm actively sharing calendars with my wife and both my kids), events in floating time zones have some interesting properties. For instance, I schedule my event at 5pm EST with an alarm firing at 15 minutes before the event. I now fly to PST and update my calendar's time zone so that it reschedules my event for 5pm PST. I'm happy because my event shows at the "right" time in my time zone...but now suppose my wife is sharing my calendar back home. We will each get alarms for that same event at 2 different times (I'll get an alarm at 4:45pm PST, she'll get the alarm at 4:45pm EST). Also, we will each perceive that appointment as occurring at two different points in time (we each see that appointment occurring at 5pm in our own time zone - which means she never really knows if I'm in or out of my meeting....so by solving the problem for yourself, you created the same problem for evey single person who shares your calendar). Again - these may all be non-issues for your specific situation.

Vandana22 completely gets it - I have to figure this out for my boss who lives much of the time in Asia, but travels all over the world. Main office and my office is in California - we have his time zone fixed for Asia and have time zone support turned off on iPad and iPhone - I tried setting appointment times for each individual time zone that he will be in when that appointments happens, but the result is it all adjusts for Asia time so a 2 pm appointment in Los Angeles shows up at 11 p.m. the previous day. Makes it really hard when we are talking to folks and scheduling additional meetings to see what the day really looks like. My best workaround so far is creating a second calendar that I call California (or wherever he will be other than Asia) and duplicating all the appointments to happen in that time zone. So the 2 pm Thursday appointment will show up at 11 p.m. Wednesday on the main "Asia" calendar and at 2 pm on the secondary "California" calendar. Then we will hide the main calendar when he is actually in California to hopefully avoid confusion.

That seems to be a lame solution but better than going back to paper, which I am seriously considering.

Interested in hearing your feedback.

Wow, this discussion has been going on for over a year and it has not been fixed????

This is not rocket science. I just moved from an Android & Gmail, and there solution was seamless & effortless, and was fixed/corrected shortly after they released multiple timezone even functionality.

Here's how it can easily work.

In gCalendar via a web browser, one opens a new event. You put in the start time, say departing Denver at 4pm. You click a button "Time Zone" on the event window. A subwindow opens up, you check "Use separate start and end time zones" and two time zone dropdown menus open. Mountain Time is my default, so I need not change that for my start time. My 3 hour flight arrives in Atlanta at 9pm EST. I enter 9pm for the event end time and select "Eastern Time Zone" in the dropdown menu that follows. Hit done and complete the rest of my event details.

This event automatically shows the 3hr duration. If my computer time is MST, it shows me the event based on MST. If my computer, or more importantly my phone (which auto updates once I physically change times zones) changes to EST, that event on the phone calendar shows up for a 3 hour duration in EST where I'm at.

gCalender even has different timezone options in the dropdown menu for places like Arizona that do not observe Daylight Savings.

There is no TZS button either on the phone or web interface, there is no way to get confused. Similar problems happened with gCal when timezones were first released, but they fixed it quickly, because it was flawed.

Having just come to the iPhone, realizing it was the superior mobile device, it doesn't make me very happy to see Apple is doing nothing about this simple problem that' causes real problems for the people using the phone & who travel a lot between timezones.

<Edited by Host>

gMail & gCal will be setup the following way.

Settings->Accounts->Add Account...->GMail

Add your account information. Make sure your Mail, Calendars & Notes are turned On

Accounts->iCloud->Turn Off .... Mail, Calendars, Reminders & Notes. Contacts should already be Off.

Settings->MCC-> scroll down to Mail section, adjust as necessary. At the bottom you can set your Default Account. This option will not visible if you only have one email account set up.

I have 3... 1 Gmail Per, 1 Gmail Biz & an Outlook Exchange account.

Ok, now that these are set up.... I'm doing some tests with calendars. I set my new events up through the web/gmail. Even with gmail/android phones, if I create a new event, options are limited, so I usually need to go into gmail/web to add extra details, etc.

I have some all day events. Say for example.... I am working out of town for 4 days, my job location, rental car & hotel run the duration. iPhone as well as Android will post these all day events in my notice screen.

Ok, say with have a 1 hour meeting.... 4pm to 5pm. gCal Events have reminders at the bottom of the event (or a default setting if you choose for new events)... options are, Email, Pop-Up or SMS. You can add as many as you want.

I added a new event in 30 minutes to test from gmail/web. I added a 20 minute popup reminder. 10 minutes later it popped up on my computer (gCal was open) and it popped up on my iPhone too. Also in the notice screen, it shows the event happening "now".

Ok... this is working. I did not address Timezones or Multiple TimeZones. This I will have to test, but because gCal/web is driving the events, not the iPhone Calendar (app), I am almost certain this will operate flawlessly based on the gCal/web driver and the iPhone clock time once it updates in another timezone, aka landing in Chicago from SF.

I have to say I do not know where the TimeZoneSupport TZS options are on the iPhone, or apparently there is one in the iCal settings somewhere. I am hoping they are shut off. But it should not matter, given gCal/web is driving the iPhone Calendar app via sync.

Hopes this explains and is helpful.

If I have a lunch on Friday at 1pm in Los Angeles, that lunch is at 1pm regardless of where I am when I look at the calendar. If I'm in New York on Wednesday, and my calendar tells me my Friday lunch is at 4pm, it's wrong. Plain and simply wrong. There is no way of thinking about it in which my current whereabouts are relevant to the scheduled time of my lunch in Los Angeles.

I understand that all of this complexity is serving multi-user calendars and conference call invitations in which an event is occurring over multiple timezones; that doesn't change the fact that iCal should offer the simple choice to opt out. You schedule an appointment for 1pm, and that appointment is at 1pm. Anytime you look at your calendar, the event will appear at 1pm. Period. That option is an absolute necessity.

I travel frequently, but I do not share my calendar with other users. In ALL cases, I would like to have the security of being able to schedule an event and know that it will be in the same place every time I look at it. The closest I can come to that with iCal is to leave TZS turned on, forever anchored in the timezone I lived in when TZS was invented. I never change it, and I let every event I add default to the same timezone (rather than specify the actual location) and so my events (past and present) remain consistent wherever I go. However, if I'm not physically in that original timezone, I can't use Siri to add an event, and I can't set alerts, because both of those functions use location services to second-guess what I want.

In this way I limp through my scheduling with a semi-effective workaround for a half-functional application. But I don't see how anyone does any better with iCal, unless they never travel.

A question for Chrismcs: You've done a good job of explaining the underlying architecture, but how do you use iCal? When you have a 1p meeting next week in a different timezone, and you glance at your calendar to remind yourself when the meeting is, do you expect to see 1p? Or do you do the conversion in your head every time?

Hotwheels,

Yes, you're right that "floating" does the opposite of what its name suggests, and actually prevents appointments from floating, keeping them locked to the correct time, irrespective of your location on the globe. So it would be a solution to the timezone support debacle if not for the fact that this function isn't available on your iphone or ipad. Which is pretty much a deal-breaking caveat for me.

If they one day add this function to iOS, that will be a step in the right direction. It's still inconvenient to have to manually apply what amounts to a "don't screw this up" tag to each and every new appointment. Not screwing it up should be the default option. If it were possible to make "floating" the default timezone for every appointment I enter on every device, then the problem really would be solved.

I haven't had the oomph to switch over to Google-based calendar apps, so my solution has been to leave timezone support on, locked to the timezone I lived in when timezone support first reared its head. It's not where I live now, but if I change the timezone in my calendar, years worth of history changes with it. So, my calendar stays locked to one timezone, I live in another, I keep timezone support on, and my appointments stay where I put them. But I can't set alarms within the calendar because they go off at the wrong time, and if I use Siri to schedule something, I have to mentally adjust the hours or Siri (which references the actual location of the phone, not the timezone set in the calendar) will put the appointment in the wrong place. But at least a 1p lunch stays a 1p lunch, no matter where I happen to be when I check to see what time my lunch is next week.

How iCal developers could ignore this mess year after year comes down to arrogance, I guess. They must think, "the system works perfectly, if only you understood it."

Ironically, there was a fix, but it went away.

Apple added the ability to select TIMEZONE = none (or floating?).

Essentially, it told the calendar to ignore the time zone (CST,MST,PST) information, but keep the time (Dec 25 @ 5:30pm). This meant that even when you change your Application to another time-zome, Christmas dinner is still at 5:30pm when you look at your calendar. For 90% of the people, this is the desired simplicity. Probably less than 10% of users (the business travelers communicate across time zones) want the face value of the times to EVER change.

Today, iCal (still) supports the SIMPLE floating/none time zones. But the feature is hidden, and not within reach of the average user. Apple took the "none/floating" option away from the "Edit Event" dialog.😟

If you have some programming skill, you can manually remove the time-zone information from the .ICS files.

This problem has been waxing and waning for years. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1289964?tstart=0

Travelling and keeping appointments both in my home time zone and current time zone, to say nothing about flight times, remains excruciating with Apple's configuration: For business reasons my calendar needs to remain on Chicago time, which you can do with time zone overide; but then when you make an appointment while traveling that appointment also goes on US central time, although if you open the appointment you can show your current time zone for the appointment. In short, you have to do time zone mental gymnastics either with time zone override, which can't get your traveling appointments correct, or the time zone feature on, which adjusts your home calendar times to your current time zone. I read this entire thread and do believe I understand the software issues. In a way, the executive assistant who wrote during the summer of 2013 seems to me on the right track -- keep a paper calendar! Why not have a toggle switch on the calendar that says "use as though a paper calendar," which would unlink the calendar entirely from any time zone configuration. You would have to have a sub-text that warns that alarm and reminders from the calendar can't be given, but for some of us that would be a good trade-off.

Exactly: if you do NOT activate Tme Zone Support the time will stay at the time of your own time zone: it will not change when you fly to a new time zone. So DO NOT SET TimeZone Support: you know what the time is.

pinkfloyd1969,

Try this experiment. Turn TZS on, then change the time zone to somewhere other than your actual time zone.

You will see all the times change to reflect that new time zone. They will not change when you go to another time zone as long as you have TZS on. This behavior is just like your paper calendar.

Turn TZS off and all the times will change back to reflect your actual time zone. Now if you go to another time zone, all the times will change to reflect the new time zone.

I have Mountain Lion installed, so perhaps it doesn't work the same way on earlier versions of OSX.

Pink has it right. There seems to be no way to just have the calendar times stay still! Either way, it won't work because calendar doesn't know your future plans etc. apple must fix this, with an option that most people will use to keep times for events constant. The ONLY use for the existing scheme is shared calendars with conference calls between time zones. Maybe the engineer working on this was having a lot of those.

Hello Hotwheels.

As you saw & responded to... I found many of these different threads on mostly the same problem. The only other problems I was seeing with Time Zones in support posts, was Apple's/Google's delayed fixing of wrong UTC designations when it came to either Daylight Savings Time or religious calendar settings.

Which are clearly different than this issue.

Like I said, I'll be traveling soon and will do some tests.

My posts came from being brand new to all Apple products, and my wrong belief (based on everything I was reading) that I needed iCloud to sync gMail/gCal with my iPhone, and somehow being forced into using iCal. Hopefully this is not the case.

In other discussions, I was instructed to set up gMail & gCal through the normal gMail "add account" feature. Once I turned off iCloud for both, gMail synced no problem. I'm thinking gCal will do the same.

"gContacts" however were set up using "Other->Add CalDav Account", with iCloud turned off. This too has worked, syncing edits & new contacts only with gMail, not iCloud (especially with new contacts via iPhone). So I'm hopeful, gCal/iPhone "Calender" will operate the same. 🙂

My suscipicion is, as long as UTC/DST settings cross integrate between the two... gCal from the "webosphere" will drive the event times in the calendar on the phone, and they should be spot on regardless of what timezone location I am in.

Even with Android/gMail, adjusting/setting the event starting and ending timezones was not possible from the phone calendar event. If one logged onto gCal from a web browser (tablet, phone browser or comp) one could access.

The whole "floating events" & "alerts" work-around seem like a real clustereff. If I were a die hard Apple business traveler, I would never accept Apples' disregard for addressing this problem!!!

Cheers & I'll update!

hi hans.

a great big thank you for this information. i have printed out the pertinent threads and i think i am going to try and tackle the contacts need first. again a huge thanks for taking the time to get me informed on how i might do this. i have been struggling with it for a very long time.

long form thoughts on the time zone problem:

on the time zone "sync" issue. i have gone through both my thread and this thread once again and i have to say that some of the answers are absolutely spot on (in terms of what they are saying they need) while some of the other answers were mildly infuriating. that said, perhaps this is in fact an issue of people not communicating well due problems with definitions/terminology. here goes a set of suggestions that i hope helps (and anyone who knows what i would like to see implemented should feel free to add or clarify):

note that all of the following are based upon the assumption that you actually let your iPhone update to the local time zone automatically when you travel. this would be the equivalent of updating your watch when you land somewhere but your phone is doing this for you automatically. if you don't want this to happen, presumably you can turn off the "Update to Local Time Zone" function which would be set on individual devices. that said, given the descriptions below i am not seeing a reason why this should be necessary because i cannot see why the current time zone should necessarily determine what your calendar does - if the implementation allowed you to control it properly.

"Event":

this is an event that stays at the time that you set it wherever you happen to go in the world. if you are in central standard time zone and you set an event to 7:00 PM, this event will show up and alert as 7:00 PM CST no matter where you are in the world. it will say "7:00 PM CST" while you are in CST. if you travel to the eastern standard time zone this event will update to the local time zone and will then say "8:00 PM EST (7:00 PM CST)".

if you want to set an "Event" by using some other Time Zone (say while in CST), you should simply pull down to that time zone and it will show up initially as an event at the time zone you are in, with the /selected/ time zone appended to it. this "pulldown event" would - for instance - say "7:00 PM CST (8:00 PM EST)" if i pulled down to central standard time when i set the 8:00 PM event.

the reason iCal is showing you a time in parenthesis in this case is because this is the time zone the event was set for but you are currently in a different time zone. if you set an alert for this event it will quite naturally alert you at the time this event is taking place while you are in CST or in EST or in some other time zone. if you did then travel to another time zone - say west coast - this latter event would say "5:00 PST (8:00 EST)" and it would of course alert you at 5:00 PM CST.

iCal will behave similarly for an event that is not a "pulldown event" (i.e. one where you simply set a date and time while in your current time zone. in this case (say the first example), this event that was set at 7:00 PM CST would read as "7:00 PM CST" when you get on the plane to go to Los Angeles. when you arrive in Los Angeles and turn off "airplane mode", you will then see this as "5:00 PM PST (7:00 PM CST)" while walking down the aisle and after having grabbed your bags and successfully avoided whacking someone in the head with it.

this way if i set an "Event" for PST for my return flight from Los Angeles (while i am in CST) i can select the correct time zone and i can SEE the correct time zone at all times. i will know what time this event takes place in the time zone i am in and i will know what time the event takes place in the time zone where the event is actually taking place. i /see/ the time zone i am in first because this is where my two feet are standing and where my head is as it is being held up by my body. but more importantly - it will also ALERT me while i am in PST time zone correctly (i.e. in advance of the event by 30 minutes or an hour or whatever) and it will not get adjusted in some confounding way for some confounding reason.

"Hard Time Event": this is an event that stays at a constant time (i.e. it is always the same number wherever you happen to go in the world. this event will say "7:00 PM CST" when you are in central time zone, or "7:00 PM EST" when you are in eastern time zone or 7:00 PM PST while you are on the west coast. and it will alert based upon this local time. presumably if you wished to know when this event was taking place in some other time zone (for instance CST) you could presumably check a box that says "Append Home Time Zone to Hard Time Events". in this case this 7:00 PM event in China will automatically append in parenthesis to whatever the CST equivalent is to 7:00 PM at that spot in China (or Katmandu or whatever). it would say "7:00 PM (whatever time CST)".

"Executive Mode Events". presumably there is a need to see all events at a particular time zone no matter where you are - or two or more particular time zones no matter where you are. in this case i would imagine one could simply have a calendar-based checkbox that says "Record All Events in Home Time Zone and Append Event Time in Parenthesis". in this case one would let the calendar default to your Home Time Zone - or your would set a Home Time Zone for that Calendar. this Calendar would show all events as "7:00 PM PST (whatever time it is in Katmandu)" or "8:15 AM PST (whatever time it is in China)". this would happen if you pulled down to Katmandu time zone and set an event or if you pulled down to China Time Zone while setting an event. if you simply set an event in PST it would not append anything in the parenthesis and simply say "7:00 PM PST". i supose if you wanted to know what time this Local Time Zone Event was in China or Katmandu you could have a checkbox that said "Append Time Zone <pulldown to time zone X" to all Home Time Zone Events".

presumably this way you could then have a Katmandu Calendar or a China Calendar and the events here would read "Whatever Time Katmandu (7:00 PST)" or "Whatever Time China (7:00 PST)". this way, one of these could be for the person tracking the boss's schedule (this would be the PST calendar since they are in PST) and the latter two could be for the Boss while travelling in China and then Katmandu or whatever. ideally one could simply have a copy function which would let you set the calendar in your Local Time Zone and have the copies simply convert per the time zone change. this way the person taking care of this could keep the calendar as PST and PUBLISH a copy of this as a Katmandu Calendar and one as a China Calendar.

i am guessing that major confusion could be avoided with these two scenarios by having a setting that says "Always Show Events in this Calendar According to Home Time Zone" which is probably a given since this calendar is specifically set for one time zone and you could also have one that says "Do Not Adjust the Appended Portion of (regular) Events in this Calendar when in Other Time Zones (i.e. keep time zones fixed)". this setting would ostensibly let the boss always have two calendars that tell him/her when the events are taking place in Chine and in Katmandu, irrespective of where he/she happens to be at the moment. presumably the appended aspect of these two calendars could be controlled as either showing the LOCAL TIME for the time zone he/she is currently in or you could tell these Executive Calendars to always show you another time zone as appended to the events. For instance both the Katmandu and the China Calendars could show the local time zone in parenthesis or they could simply show the Home Time Zone and append PST times to all events.

anyway, the lack of functionality here was making me a bit grumpy and some of the responses seemed a bit off target. obviously i am not tied to any of that but i thought that putting my head to it my productively add to the future implementation or at least help in describing what i need. if something more modest on this is not in the recent iOS update it would be wonderful to see in the next release.

BTW, i do think there is something in there for the guy that wanted all his events to show up "datebook-like" in the sense that one could simply set all events with a pulldown for the time zone they want (or just default to Home or even where you happen to be at the moment) and you could tell iCal not to update these events. alternatively there should be something above that lets you set the event to a time zone and have your Home Zone appended in parenthesis or has your current time zone appended in parenthesis or has your current time zone listed and the original time of the event and the original time zone appended in parenthesis.

excluding the complexities of accepting and transferring the actual time zone information it seems like programming something to accomplish the above is pretty straightforward IMHO.

peace.