Does local time zone need a name?

[David Jarvie]

On Monday 2 April 2007 15:55, Torsten Rahn wrote:
> On Monday 02 April 2007 16:22:44 Matt Rogers wrote:
>> I'd prefer to see the name of the time zone that I'm in. To me, it's
>> better
>> presentation of information to say that I'm in the Pacific time zone
>> rather
>> than "Local Zone" or some other such thing. WTH is "Local Zone" supposed
>> to
>> mean anyways? It's too context dependant, IMO. I don't want to keep
>> track
>> of what time zone I'm in. The computer is supposed to do that for me.
>
> Isn't that like argueing that e.g. daily file system scans should be
> described
> in the interface to happen on "Monday" just because today is "Monday" and
> what exactly is "daily" meant to mean anyways in terms of days of a week?
> ;-)
>
> "Local Zone" would exactly make sense if the user does not want to have to
> deal with the timezone names and if the computer is able to retrieve all
> information about times and timezones automatically. E.g. If I ask my
> computer to wake me up each day at 8:00 then I certainly don't want to
> specify a fixed timezone for that if I happened to travel quite fast and
> frequently: If I did, the computer would translate the timezone to 16:00
> in a
> different timezone and might wake me up way too late (or too early).

This highlights one of the problems of using "local zone" in place of the
time zone name. "Local zone" can have two quite distinct meanings as far
as a user is concerned:

- in some circumstances I might mean the local zone in use I set something
up, and don't change the zone even if I later change time zones. For
example, I might want to set up a regular phone meeting with my boss for
10:00 in my home time zone. If in 6 months' time I unexpectedly had to
make a foreign trip west it might then become 05:00 (heaven forbid!) in
the new local zone.

- the case you cite is the other interpretation of "local zone". I want to
be woken up at a particular time of day in whatever happens to be the
local zone at the time of the wake-up call.

How is a user to easily distinguish between these two meanings? For the
former, IMHO the actual time zone name should be used; the meaning is then
unambiguous. "Local zone" should be reserved for the latter case, i.e. a
flexible meaning dependent on location.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KAlarm author & maintainer.
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm