Calendar: What am I missing? Why isn’t this (fix) obvious?

So here’s a whine that seems so obvious that I’m sure I’m missing something. And if I am, please let me know.

The problem is time zones and (what I will continue to call) iCal.

The Problem

You live in Boston, and you’re traveling to San Francisco at the end of the week. You have a simple life (if only!): the only thing on your calendar is lunch. Lunch each day is at noon. Using iCal as it is, you enter lunch for 3 days at noon where you are. You then enter lunch on Friday at noon, Pacific time, in SF. This is what it looks like in iCal.

Obviously, this looks weird. “Why am I having lunch at 3pm?” And of course, look closely and you can see it says 12pm PDT. But it shows as 3pm on the calendar, which makes scheduling other things complicated. “I can’t meet at 3pm, cause I have a lunch then. Oh wait…”

My solution has been to ignore time zones — and to simply schedule events at the time they will be when I’m there. I turn time zones off in my calendar in iCal on iPhone (technically, I turn on “Time Zone Override”), and everything works.

For me. But if I want to share calendars with others, to coordinate meetings or whatever, this “solution” is a disaster: They can’t see when I am actually free (without needing to know everything about my schedule). So the one thing cloud-based calendars should make simple is now—at least for people who travel—impossibly difficult.

“Floating” doesn’t solve the problem

When I started researching to write this whine, I discovered something that I thought would solve the problem. @benlovejoy had written about it intelligently at 9to5Mac. But astonishingly, the “solution” doesn’t solve the problem.

Apple has added the option of setting “Floating” as the Time Zone. So if you schedule lunch at noon, and set the time zone to “floating,” then it will appear at noon wherever you are.

That sounds like a solution. It isn’t, for two reasons, one truly astonishing.

The astonishing reason is that there is no floating option on the iPhone. As it is, as I said, I override time zones in my iPhone calendar. But if I decided not to override time zones, I could use the floating entries from my computer and it would show up where I wanted it to. But I can’t add an entry on my iPhone choosing floating as the time zone. Seriously! One company, no common functionality between the same calendar app.

But the more fundamental reason this isn’t a solution is that it doesn’t solve the coordination problem. If I want to coordinate with people in different time zones, floating fixes nothing. They want to know the real-time I am committed to something; floating doesn’t reveal that.

The Solution

Calendar apps should have a location layer: It should figure out, or allow me to set, where I will be, and then let me view my calendar in the way it will appear when I am where I will be.

So again, on Monday, I enter lunch in San Francisco Friday. I choose 12pm PT. As shown above, with iCal as it is, that looks like 3pm to me on Monday in Boston. But if there were a “Local View” option, then it could appear as 12pm Friday when I look at it Monday, though actually the real-time with the right time zone was recorded. It could look like this.

Then, if I needed to schedule a call with a friend in Japan, I could share my calendar(s), and they could see the real-time I was busy on Friday, regardless of how my schedule appeared to me. This solution would allow you to schedule with time zones, meaning you’re scheduling with real-time, but viewing the calendar according to how it will appear (on your iPhone) when the event occurs.

Obviously, the extra step — specifying where you will be—could be architected to be simple to indicate. The default would be your home. iCal could figure out (based on the location of the event) where you’re going to be when you have the event. So again, if I had entered the restaurant in the entry on Friday, it should know the time zone, and accept the time with that time zone, and it would know where I will be, so it could populate the presumed location automatically. The only time that wouldn’t work is if the event has no physical location (a call, e.g.). Then, for this to work, I’d need to specify where I’ll be.

This solution (1) allows you to use real time zones, but (2) doesn’t force you to view your calendar with things in weird places, so (3) you can coordinate events with people everywhere, based on (1).

Further whine

Finally, one further whine: Apple used to allow you to have hierarchical calendars. So I could put all my family’s calendars under one master, and then share the aggregate, or turn the aggregate on or off. This made it easy to aggregate all calendars affecting you and share that, without including calendars affecting others.

For some reason, Apple removed that functionality, making the core reason for this redesign — to coordinate with others — difficult to implement. I divide calendars based on the kinds of events —teaching, traveling, etc. Without this old functionality, there’s no simple way to share my availability. (Fantastical does have this functionality, but it doesn’t solve the time zone problem.)

So what am I missing? And if I’m missing nothing, please, Apple or Flexibits or whoever, just steal this idea. No attribution required!