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Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

thetimezoneconverter.com

31–40 of 88 posts

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#31
This is awesome. One suggestion/request? If I enter the time in 24hr mode, can it please be left that way? Right now it converts it to am/pm... I don't know why, but my brain only functions in 24hr mode and seeing 14:45 change to 2:45 made me think there was a bug before I noticed the PM next to it.

Otherwise this is immensely useful!

I think "smart parsing textboxes" are the best things ever. I really like the one on letsfreckle.com for time interval entry. Letting users just type in a format that is comfortable to them is so nice.

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#33

First reactions: tab field-switching and/or JS execution order. Time is on top, so I'll input that first, then want to set the TZ. Tab goes time1->time2->tz1->tz2, which is unintuitive to me at least. In addition, filling in the dominant origin field first (time) is counter-productive as changing the TZ afterwards then auto-modifies the origin time - clearly not as I intended. This absolutely makes sense from a progr…

Thanks for giving it a close look. I debated these points and came up with arguments on both sides of how updating should work.

I agree more with your tab ordering point. As far as JS execution (deciding which time to update when city changes) I saw arguments both ways and in the end decided to copy the behavior of a unit conversion dashboard widget from Apple. Not a good reason but it served as my starting point.

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#34

This is awesome. One suggestion/request? If I enter the time in 24hr mode, can it please be left that way? Right now it converts it to am/pm... I don't know why, but my brain only functions in 24hr mode and seeing 14:45 change to 2:45 made me think there was a bug before I noticed the PM next to it. Otherwise this is immensely useful! I think "smart parsing textboxes" are the best things ever. I really like the one o…

Third request here for different 24h behavior. I remember hearing the advice "listen to your users" somewhere... so I'll prioritize that. Thanks.

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#35
very nice indeed, a lot better than the previous entries, well done for a taking a pretty standard idea and making a much more usable version, hopefully you can start a trend!

I'd agree that you definitely need to take into account date/time adjustments like British Summer Time etc.

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#36
Really cool! Minor nits:

* Multiple equivalent GMTs (GMT, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), GMT + 0)...

* GMT+n would ideally be in numeric order [but alpha sort doesn't make this easy, just something to think about]

* Include country name for cities: "Seattle (USA)" ... just gives you that warm fuzzy that you're in the right country.

* Instead of "next day" it might be nice to say "next morning/afternoon/evening/night" or whatever it happens to be. Less mental parsing ("12:30am next day... means really early in the morning right?")

Anyway, great job!

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#37
Apparently 9:31 AM in Dublin time is NaN:aN PM in Dubai time...

Besides that, its a nice app.

EDIT: Since I got downvoted for this, let me rephrase in terms of a bug report: My local time is Dublin, Ireland (so UTC) and I entered 9:30 AM as the local time. Then I changed Greenwich to Dubai. The updating was pretty slow, so before it completed, I changed the local time to 9:31 and the output I got was NaN:aN PM. I'm able to reproduce it by following the same steps (though the actual local time entered doesn't seem to matter - just that its changed before the "updating..." text disappears).

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#38
This is the best timezone converter I've ever seen. Nice work.

Though really, I'm surprised Google hasn't added timezone conversion to their various measurement converters. I really just want a single text field that takes input in the format "[time/date] in [location/timezone]." For example, "1:30am PST in UTC" or "Tuesday 5pm in Paris."

Re: Accepting the "I could do that in a weekend" challenge

#40
post #36

Really cool! Minor nits: * Multiple equivalent GMTs (GMT, GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), GMT + 0)... * GMT+n would ideally be in numeric order [but alpha sort doesn't make this easy, just something to think about] * Include country name for cities: "Seattle (USA)" ... just gives you that warm fuzzy that you're in the right country. * Instead of "next day" it might be nice to say "next morning/afternoon/evening/night" or…

Thanks - I need an "accept all" button for these suggestions. On the multiple equivalents though, that was intentional to handle multiple ways people might want to type it in. Perhaps it's confusingly redundant.
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