Wednesday, March 10, 2010

my iPhone mail and calendering application has a bug

I showed up exactly 3 hours late for a meeting. I was traveling from East Coast to the West Coast. Two things happened. Actually one happened and one didnot. My iPhone time automatically changed to PST. But, the calendar was still operating on EST as it requires an explicit change of zone.

Now things get interesting as the alerting functionality was picking up the time from iPhone time. So i was getting alerts for a personal reminder i had set at 10.00 EST each day at 10.00 PST. For some reason I did not notice this error. I think the reason is that time zone shift hadn't happened totally in my mind. For this particular reminder I actually did want to be reminded at 10.00 AM local time and that is what i was getting so I didnot find anything amiss. In fact, this behaviour lulled me into thinking that all was correct.

A consistent and correct solution is for all the functions in email and calendering appplications (and all linked applications) to pick time and zone data from a single source. If there are multiple sources user should be warned about conflicts.

Note to self, always manually change the time zone or switch the time zone support to "off"