Re: Alternative UI for changing time and timezone

[Mattias Holmlund <mattias holmlund gmail com>]

On 8/18/05, Arjan Geven <arjangeven gmail com> wrote:
> On 8/17/05, Mattias Holmlund <mattias holmlund gmail com> wrote:
> > You can read the proposal at
> > 
> > http://www.holmlund.se/f-spot/time-edit-proposal.html
> > 
> > /Mattias
> > 
> 
>  Hi Mattias, list,
>  
>  This mockup looks pretty good! 
>  
>  In this screenie, it looks like you can not only change the hours, but also
> the minutes. Time zones go in hours, so I don't really see why anybody would
> want to change this time as well.. (although, if the time in the camera was
> a few minutes off perhaps, but that's really a marginal use case).

If we allow the user to change the time, we might as well allow him to
compensate for errors other than wrong timezone. My intention is that
the Adjustment field should allow you to compensate everything from
wrong year to wrong seconds. Imagine a user that forgot to set the
time on his camera when he bought it. His times will be off in
everything from years to seconds.

I haven't quite figured out how the adjustment should be expressed
when it is bigger than 24 hours. The easiest thing for the user to do
is to edit the "Adjusted time" field and the dialog will automatically
enter the correct value in the Adjustment field.

>  
>  Perhaps it would even be better if the time can also be changed with an up-
> and down-arrow. No typing necessary, just click the arrows to increase or
> decrease the time in one hour intervals. The same applies for the date:
> arrow-up for next day, arrow-down for previous day.

These kinds of controls usually annoy me. To allow everything to be
adjusted, we need up/down arrows for year, month, day, hour, minute,
and second. It seems a lot easier to just use the keyboard. I wonder
if the Gnome HIG has something to say about this?

>  
>  The adjusted time zone should then not be an editable field, but only the
> result of what was entered in the 'changes' field directly above it. 

Acutally, the Adjust timezone field is used to tell f-spot what
timezone the Adjusted time is in. This is necessary to allow f-spot to
convert the time into a UTC time internally that it can use to sort
photos in proper chronological order.

>  
>  Additionally, even after following the whole discussion on display time and
> photo time, the text you added below is absolutely necessary before
> understanding why the dialog is split into two parts. This means that for
> the average user, the whole second part will be seen as a big question mark,
> having no idea what all that talking about time zones means.

I agree that the dialog is somewhat complex. But timezones is a
complex problem to fix. I googled to find out how other applications
handle this, but I didn't find any other solution.

Most other applications just ignore the problem. 

> It doesn't make
> things clearer, so I'd omit it. 

I would argue that the most confusing interface is the one that
doesn't provide you with enough information to figure out the details
of how it actually works. Hiding the timezones inside the application
might make the dialog look simpler, but then it becomes harder for the
user to figure out how it actually works.

> Of course, it does have a very special use
> case, but it's one that's way beyond average use...

I think the Display timezone concept is very useful. If you always
have your camera set to UTC, then you only have to set the Display
timezone for your pictures to get a correct display of the time. But I
agree that it might be confusing.

How about it if we change the dialog to look like this:

http://www.holmlund.se/f-spot/Dialog-alternative2.png

The default will be to use the same timezone as the Photo timezone.
This means that a normal user who always changes his camera into local
time wherever he is will only have to enter the Photo timezone for his
pictures if he has taken pictures in a different timezone than his
default timezone, and he will never have to change the Photo timezone.
A user that has his camera set to UTC will only have to change the
Display timezone for all his pictures and never touch the Photo
timezone. Some users will probably even want to display all times in
the same timezone (their local timezone probably):

http://bopuc.levendis.com/weblog/archives/-2004/07/16/timestamp_timezones_in_flickr.php
 
/Mattias