Just to add a tiny wrinkle: On Sep 9, 2013, at 20:27 , Jens Alfke <j...@mooseyard.com> wrote: > On Sep 9, 2013, at 10:48 AM, Jeffrey Oleander <jgo...@yahoo.com> wrote: >> [..] Some do, but the dread of customer rebellion is strong, and they want >> to enter them in the slap-dash, hurried, harried ways they're used to >> writing them, or finding them in their source materials. > > You’re mixing this up with a totally different issue. > > *Users* should be able to enter dates however the hell they want. [] Yes it > can be awkward to parse natural-language dates, but it’s pretty much a solved > problem. I really appreciate software like Fantastical and Siri that lets me > type/say stuff like “next tue 3pm”.
And performance isn’t really that critical for user entry on a single user machine, unless you’re a much faster typist than I am. :-) So turn all the heuristics and sophisticated processing when you are receiving user input and then store it in a standardized format.. > *Data formats* should use strict standards for dates. [rss horror stories] …that can be parsed efficiently and reliably. And no, in my experience just storing Unix time or some other well-defined UTC time is not enough for many use-cases, you actually want to know the local time the user intended. For example, you don’t probably don’t want to have per-day processing kicked off at midnight zulu if you are on the west coast, and you want that to change if the machine is moved. > These are of course unrelated issues because no one would put unparsed > user-input date strings into a well-defined file format. Right? *g* Marcel _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
