ArticlesAll timezone applications require you to specify what city you are in (where “all” is carefully defined as all of the ones I have had to deal with and that I can remember.)
I’ve never understood why you select the city rather than the state, province or country.
The timezones aren’t set on a city-basis, so why do we specify that? Why should people in Wollongong need to lie and say they live in Sydney, rather than specifying New South Wales? Why should I have to know the capital city of Ohio to know what time it is there?
I feel I am missing some usability issue here that explains the user interface choice, but I just can’t see it.
Comment by Alastair on April 21, 2006
Easy counter-example:
Broken Hill, NSW is in the SA time zone.
Comment by Julian on April 21, 2006
An aside for the non-locals: Broken Hill is an Australian mining city that is close to the border of New South Wales and South Australia. While it is strictly in the state of New South Wales, it is much closer to the capital of South Australia (Adelaide, 500 km away) than the capital of New South Wales (Sydney, 1100 km away). As a result, Broken Hill has a close affinity to South Australia, including sharing timezones, TV stations, telephone prefixes, etc.) For example, if you want to know the weather tomorrow in Broken Hill, you watch the South Australian TV channels, not the New South Welsh ones.
Alastair,
Oooh, I thought you had me there for a while.
Fortunately, I was saved by my strange definition of “all”.
I looked in Windows timezones. Broken Hill doesn’t get a mention, so Broken Hill residents would have to lie and say they live in Adelaide or Darwin.
Then I looked at TimeAndDate.com which is my preferred reference site, and found it didn’t have an entry for Broken Hill either – again you need to chose Adelaide or Darwin.
I looked at my Samsung phone and only found the choice for Adelaide – not even Darwin gets a mention.
Searching further, I found a competitor to TimeAndDate.com that I hadn’t used before, called WorldTimeServer.com. It did have a special entry for Broken Hill.
Here’s where it gets interesting – WorldTimeServer.com allows you to select timezones by countries or major cities so it addresses my concern. Just to confuse things, however, it doesn’t list Broken Hill in the list of major cities – you need to navigate to it by listing the countries, selecting Australia, finding Australia and selecting Broken Hill from the sub-list that otherwise includes states and territories.
Noticing that I was opening up myself to a blast for referencing Windows but not *nix, I looked it up. Under the directory for Australia (/usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia), Linux has references to cities, including Adelaide, Darwin and Broken Hill.
Comment by Alastair on April 21, 2006
Hmm, that’s strange. I didn’t notice that definition of “all” there before.
Oh well I must be mistaken. Julian would never revise a post of his to avoid embarrassment. Oh no. Not Julian.
Comment by Richard on April 22, 2006
More on the Broken Hill aside: it’s actually in a time zone called Yancowinna, named after the county surrounding Broken Hill (and the creek just east of the same name). Oddly enough, residents of the County of Yancowinna are also not party to any of the award rates that their other New South Welsh counterparts may be.
When it comes to library implementations of timezone info, Java seems to have the city name system (including special locations like Broken Hill), but not the state name system. For some reason up until Java 5, this info was different to the local OS timezone info (if the OS provides such a service), meaning that both the JVM and the OS would need to be patched whenever a country messed around with its perfectly workable timezone adjustments for some sporting event or other.
However, anything that uses the tzcode package* (such as Time Zone Converter, Mac OS X, and your local cygwin, bsd and linux distributions) are going to list both types. If only tzcode had enough meta information to break their lists down into state/county and city, rather than lumping them all in together in one big list…
* maintained by the US Government’s National Cancer Institute? WTF? At least this country gives care and feeding of its timezone info to its keepers of conversation fillers and neat radar images.
Comment by Improfane on May 24, 2006
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679.aspx
Maybe it is because like the blog entry above, borders of countries are dodgy. Counties/provinces and countries, states are all territory. Isn’t the name of a capital city unlikely to change?
I agree it is stupid especially in stable countries that sort of thing doesn’t happen. Perhaps some open software should be brave enough to try this.
Comment by Julian on May 24, 2006
Improfane,
Nice! That link explains why they don’t let you point to your timezone location on a map. Thanks for that.
I am stilling mulling over the question that that this raises: Is the name of a capital city more or less stable than the name of the territory that encloses it?
I think that you are probably right: a capital city name is less likely to change, and that motivates software developers to use cities over countries.
Of course, there are plenty of counter examples.
Now I have They Might Be Giants stuck in my head. 🙁