Small Details: Date
One thing we really should look into in Gnome is how we represent date strings. I like the new Evolution alarm dialog a lot, but instead of having
- Start time: Tue 11/23/2004 01:30 PM
- Start time: Tue 11/24/2004 09:00 AM
- Start time: Tue 11/29/2004 3:30 PM
...we could have something like:
- Start time: Today, 1:30 pm
- Start time: Tomorrow. 9:00 am
- Start time: Next monday, 3:30 pm
At least I am finding the "human language" version easier to understand. I need a calendar to get an idea what "2004/11/29" means in real-life terms, while "next monday" is immediately obvious. Many times when you see a time or date string, you want to know how it relates to current time.
Alex's Tomboy has a nice "pretty printing" date function that does some of this, and Evolution has one in the mail header display (in the "Sent" and "Received" columns for example)
We could do the same with other strings that contain numbers or similar information as well. On a Mac when you download files, it just tells you "less than a minute left left" instead of "30240 bytes of total 40203 downloaded, 00:45 to go, 213.3 kb/s". If you want to know the speed, there is an arrow that you can click to expand the view.
Pages
Categories
- apple
- aviation
- blogging
- design
- drm
- embedded
- general
- geotagging
- gnome
- graphics
- lazyweb
- multimedia
- photography
- software
- spam
- web
- weblinks
- Work
Blogroll
- Anna
- Asmo
- Cheridy
- Cockpit Conversation
- Freedesktop.org
- Garrett
- Havana Aviation Consulting
- Jimmac
- Kwwii
- Mozilla Firefox
- Nat
- Old wallpaper images
- Onne
- Photo Gallery
- Planet Gnome
- Planet Maemo
- Rodney
Archive
- February 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- April 2009
- October 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
- February 2006
- January 2006
- December 2005
- November 2005
- October 2005
- September 2005
- June 2005
- May 2005
- April 2005
- March 2005
- February 2005
- January 2005
- December 2004
- November 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
November 23rd, 2004 - 16:44
Yes, very good suggestion!
I can never keep track of dates (I would be lost without the gnome clock applet), but I know when next monday is.
- Andreas
November 23rd, 2004 - 18:15
We should at least use international date and time conventions not the US ones.
November 23rd, 2004 - 20:26
If only it were that easy… even “Next Monday” means different things to different people who speak the same language! In Scotland, it usually means a week on Monday, and the first Monday after today would be “this Monday”… but in other parts of the UK, “next Monday” means “this Monday”
November 23rd, 2004 - 23:11
Calum – that’s a good point, and it can be more complicated that that too. My personal understanding is based on a week starting Monday rather than a seven day cycle, interpreting “next $day” as “$day next week”, so that while “next Monday” would be the first Monday after the current date, “next Friday” would be the second Friday.
Tuomas – I agree, the human readable dates currently in Evolution are good. Though they avoid the mess Calum raises by simply dealing with “Today” and “Yesterday” as abstracts, then falling back on “Mon”, “Tue”, etc, then falling back on date/month, etc. Not sure if that code handles the future – it’s not like you expect to get emails from two-weeks-from-now…