I didn’t notice this feature until recently, but iCal 1.5.5 can use alternate time zones when creating an event.
Thanks to the wonder of telecommuting, my employer’s time zone is 3 hours earlier than mine, so conference calls and other events are given in West Coast time. Until now I mentally converted the time when I added an appointment to my calendar.
iCal’s preference window has a checkbox labeled ‘Enable time zone support’. If you enable it, you’ll see a time zone popup menu at the top of the main window. There’s also a time zone popup in the event info panel. If you select a different time zone when creating an event, the calendar window will show the correct time for that event in the current time zone.
Now when I schedule an appointment for 10:30 Pacific time, iCal tells me that it’s 1:30 my time and will even set the alarm properly.
Well, it’s a quibble that I can’t show my sked tomorrow as departing OAK at 3:30 PST and arriving JFK at 11:45PM EST.
The real horrible problem comes when you backup and synch your Palm, phone, iPod, dotMac, etc.
These devices and even Apple’s service are even less aware of the subtleties. Several times, I have found myself up with multiple entries for the same appointment. Once I got so tangled that I had some 16,000 (!) calendar entries be juggled in a synch, most of them ridiculous duplicates. It takes forever. Took hours and some risk of losing my files to get back to the few dozens that I actually have.
It’d be nice if you entered times with a (defaultable) zone, and they were stored in GMT, with notes about the intended DISPLAY preference: specific zone or “Current Local.” Or whatever it’d take to keep this colossal SNAFU from arising. It can take hours to fix, if you mistakenly plug in your iPod to a laptop (intending only a recharge) when you’re on the road in a different zone, and have a synch happen while you’re not watching.