Timezone support in software is tricky. A lot of the time when you’re sharing information, there are several timezones involved. But it would horribly clutter the UI to display all of them, so one is picked. For instance, with email should we display the time formatted according to the local timezone or sender’s timezone? Do we care when we received it or when they sent it? For Mailtanium, I chose to display all local times in list view, so emails sort in some semblance of visual order, but to display in the native sender timezone in detail view, to remind me it’s really 3:00am in Europe. I don’t think this is an original idea, I copied it from any number of other clients.

A more perplexing case is the iPhone calendar. The calendar is unfortunately timezone aware when I don’t want it to be. My typical (practically only) use case is to enter my flight info in the calendar. I would like to enter the local time my flight leaves, as that’s the time I get from the airline website. But then my phone assumes that’s when the event occurs in my current timezone, such that when I’m two hours away, it has now “corrected” the time to be two hours different. There is a menagerie of options controlling whether my phone’s time should auto update (Yes, please! I need to know when lunch is.) and how the calender should adjust. The best I’ve found so far is to keep the calendar always pegged to a single timezone, but this means alerts go off at the wrong time because the phone still knows where it is. I would really like a simple option to say that all events take place in the “right here” timezone. I can understand that timezone correction is a nice feature for travelers who need reminders about the weekly sales call on Monday, but that’s not me. All of my events are occurring locally, I want to enter exclusively local times.