So I entered all my flight and meeting time information for this week into my Oracle Calendar. But of course those events are entered in the time zone where I entered the data. I synced my Nokia E62 calendar to my Oracle Calendar. When I arrived on the east coast, the phone changed to the current local time, and yep, you guessed it, it shifted all of my calendar entries by three hours.
Sheesh – you’d think devices meant for travelers would be smarter than this.
I know that this is something that OSAF’s Chandler software gets this right – individual calendar entries can have timezones attached to them. Are there other software and devices that get this right?
Technorati Tags: Calendaring, chandler, e62, mobile-devices, nokia, OSAF
Oren Sreebny 
Hrm. Just did a quick check – both Office 2K7 and iCal support timezones for individual entries (in iCal you have to turn on time zone support in the advanced preferences). Oracle Calendar doesn’t have this? (it’s been almost 2 years since I used it, can’t recall).
Of course, if you just created the flight & meeting info in OC using the defaults, then of course it should assume that they were in your default time zone – and of course they should show up “time shifted” when you update your phone to local time. My old Palm didn’t have true timezone support for calendaring, and I always made meeting pre-shifted when I was travelling to another timezone.
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Hrm. Just did a quick check – both Office 2K7 and iCal support timezones for individual entries (in iCal you have to turn on time zone support in the advanced preferences). Oracle Calendar doesn’t have this? (it’s been almost 2 years since I used it, can’t recall).
Of course, if you just created the flight & meeting info in OC using the defaults, then of course it should assume that they were in your default time zone – and of course they should show up “time shifted” when you update your phone to local time. My old Palm didn’t have true timezone support for calendaring, and I always made meeting pre-shifted when I was travelling to another timezone.
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Current versions of Oracle Calendar knows about a specific set of timezones and offsets. When it sees an iCalendar VTIMEZONE, it has an algorithm which attempts to map the incoming VTIMEZONE to one of the ones that it internally knows about. This often works correctly, but not always, as this is algorithmically complex (maybe not even possible) to always do correctly.
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Current versions of Oracle Calendar knows about a specific set of timezones and offsets. When it sees an iCalendar VTIMEZONE, it has an algorithm which attempts to map the incoming VTIMEZONE to one of the ones that it internally knows about. This often works correctly, but not always, as this is algorithmically complex (maybe not even possible) to always do correctly.
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