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.
November 23rd, 2004 at 15:52
I couldn’t agree more. This is definitely high on my own wishlist for future Gnome versions.
Having one method of describing time across the entire desktop would be fantastic - Gaim away time, calendar events, downloads, file copy/move, rendering time, gimp operations etc. Fantastic.
November 23rd, 2004 at 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 at 18:15
We should at least use international date and time conventions not the US ones.
November 23rd, 2004 at 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 at 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…
November 29th, 2004 at 09:55
[…] Fuzzy Dates
Filed under: General — Mike @ 12:18 am
It seems that this gnome hacker is an advocate of “human language” dates. We we […]
February 22nd, 2005 at 15:55
[…] ents in a list fashion which would show, say, a few days in advance. Or, like in my recent pondering about date views and history and how to represent them - one could have & […]