And it isn’t just deducing the right time and all that. At least in the context of operating systems, you don’t want to assume that the formatting for time and date is deduced from the location or the language chosen. For example, I am a German living in Japan and prefer to use my machines in US English. Fortunately, iOS and macOS can deal with this easily — in principle.
Many apps are effectively single locale only (think those horrible online banking apps, which are often just wrappers around horrible websites), so they can get away with it. Then there are apps like TR which have a significant international audience, but have been started within a US-centric context. So these apps have often not been designed with localizability in mind.
Correct. We’d have separate options for formatting date, time, preferred language (even in the UK there’s English, Welsh and Gaelic as native languages), etc. We’d separate the “what?” - the underlying time - from the “where?” - the user’s location - from the “how?” - the user’s preferences. Garmin devices are a good example of how not to do it! They’ve one setting - metric vs imperial/standard with the assumption that if you measure distances in km you want your weight in kilogrammes.
Yes! So true.
I reckon my British friends get short changed by many localization efforts, because US English is just as good, isn’t it!?! You are spot on when it comes to units. You can see this in Microsoft Word that apparently hard codes inches in its templates, which doesn’t give nice numbers in metric. So you have default margins of something like 1,27 cm rather than 1,25 cm. And if you are in Japan (or, I reckon, in e. g. Israel), you have several calendars used simultaneously.
That’s why you definitely don’t want to touch calendar and date management with a 3-meter-and-a-few-centimeter pole. Windows has been historically horrible with this, because e. g. you have to buy it in a fixed language. When my French and Belgian friends bought Windows laptops in Japan, their MP3 file names would get screwed up: French accents showed up as random Japanese characters. And there was no way to fix it, because installing French Windows would have taken away some Japanese language tools and produced character set problems in the other direction.
PS Units are also very tricky, because for some reason, my brain has gotten stuck on psi for pressures on my road bike and bar for my mountain bike. Weird. Don’t know why.
Will being confused because of weird date formats make me slower? Yes indeed!
Any confusion is taking up resources, potentially from my training or even racing (efficiency).
Dates look fine in the (beta, TestFlight) latest iOS version. But times are a mixed bag; I do believe the time shown for a completed workout is ok (can’t really test it, all my workouts are in the morning, but the time stamp doesn’t show “am”), but if you edit the calendar and want to set a time for a workout, the control that pops up is 12h and am/pm. I suspect this is hard-coded and doesn’t look at the locales settings.
Honestly, even though I’ve spend (lived) significant amounts of time in the USA, the sheer mixture of units and date-time-etc. formats, or better their strange and hard-to-believe usage does truly confuse me and take up mental resources…
And I have no problem believing that this “works” the other way around, too.
And, yes, I have worked on i18n and date-time implementations myself before;-)
