Re: [Evolution] Date formats

[John Lange <john johnlange ca>]

On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 13:06 -0500, Matthew Barnes wrote:
> > You can write there almost anything. It's using strftime internally,
> > thus it understands all format specifiers from it, plus a special one
> > "%ad". There is an obvious lack of information in user docs, though
> > I'm not sure whether a regular user would understand all those %.. tags.
>
> Speaking of which, that combo widget could use some usability love.
>
> Instead of listing a bunch of cryptic format codes which even I can't
> parse, the combo should list the current date and time in various
> formats with maybe a "Customize Format" option at the bottom.
>
> But before we do that I think it's worth asking does that combo really
> need to be customizable?  Really?  Couldn't we just add more options by
> popular demand?  Are there really that many more variations of date
> formats in use out there?
>
> Seems like an interaction design cop-out to me, but then I'm happy with
> the defaults so maybe I'm just being naive.

I personally believe software should strive to be both friendly for
unsophisticated users while making power users happy as well.

So, on that note, if you look at the format options of something like
OpenOffice Calc, it gives you exactly what you describe above. That is,
a long list of predefined popular options, plus the ability to tweak to
exactly what you want.

> > Are there really that many more variations of date
> > formats in use out there?

In every programming language I've used, plus things like OpenOffice
mentioned above, the number of formatting options for dates and times is
mind numbing. So, I would have to think that "yes", there are many-many
variations. Given that opensource software strives to be international
friendly, flexibility is important.

If you look at "man date", you will see the supported formats for dates
which seems to be pretty widely supported in other languages such as
PHP, Perl, etc. Evolution should use the same formaters which are more
than likely part of some standard C library.

As a side note, it also includes "%x" which falls back to the localized
date format, probably a wise default for Evolution.

-- 
John Lange
http://www.johnlange.ca