Android Will Make You Miss Your Flight02 Jun 10

I like Android, but it can't tell time.

I'm in London, booking my return flight from Trondheim. Takeoff is at 5:45pm Trondheim time. That's what's on the boarding pass, that's what I'm thinking in, and that's what I'll need to know when this event starts to matter to me. So I put 5:45pm in to google calendar and it syncs to my phone.

Then I land in Trondheim and tell my phone that my timezone has changed from GMT+1 to GMT+2. It updates the local time display - correct. Fine. But it also changes the time of every single event in my calendar.

The calendar says takeoff is at 6:45pm. I miss my flight.

Well, I don't, because I see this coming. But now my schedule has to live in my brain, and I own a phone so that I don't have to do that.

The way I used to handle this was to lie to my phone - I'd tell it "honest, I'm still in GMT+0" and change the master clock. But this breaks Android quite badly; it trusts timestamps that come in on external messages, so it sorts SMSs out of order. It's trying to be too clever and it's getting it wrong.

What it wants me to do, sitting in London booking the flight, is to think "hrm, takeoff at 5:45pm Trondheim time. What's that in London time? I should put it in my calendar in London time, since that's where I am now". Those kind of back-conversions are unnecessary and error-prone.

And that's yet another case of how adding features to software can actually make it worse.




Gwyn Morfey — facebookflickrbuy the book — London UK