Losing The Hour Just Gained
This weekend the clocks went back an hour in the UK. British Summer Time ended and we're now back on GMT.
This gives me a tenuous excuse to have a whine about my HTC Hero. With the Hero I lose and gain an hour at various points of every day and it's getting a bit annoying.
See the clatter-board-style clock on the image to the right? This is the Hero's default and the culprit for making me lose time.
When you wake/unlock the phone the time displayed is 62 minutes ago. It then changes to the current time using an animation where the numbers drop down like a clatter-board would.
How long it takes to change from an hour and two minutes ago to the current time seems to vary - from ~200ms to a second or more.
The animation is impressive eye candy the first few times you see it ("Oooh, that's nice" I remember thinking). Then it gets annoying. If you don't know what time it is (I don't wear a watch) and you're looking to the phone as a clock then it can be either a good or a bad thing.
The trouble is that it only takes the mind a fraction of a second to read the time and process it. In the time it takes the clock to update itself to the proper time my mind already thinks it's an hour earlier. If I've got up with the kids and it turns 5:30am in to 6:30am then this is a good thing. If I've just gone through the whole getting the kids to bed saga then turning 8:00pm in to 9:00pm is not a good thing!
I know I should train my mind to get used to it and add an hour on, but I just can't. It's such unexpected behaviour of a clock that my mind can't cope.
Maybe I should just remove the widget and use another clock, but this is the best one there is. I just wish they thought more about the side effect of the pointless animation. For now I'm learning to not look at it at all.
This is a perfect example of how the tiny little things become very, very annoying with objects you use all the time.
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Funny stuff... As you know Jake, I'm currently running four different mobile phones for testing one of your projects, so finding out the time in the morning is normally just a case of rolling over and unlocking any one of them to see the time.
The trouble was this Sunday I unlocked one and couldn't be sure whether or not it had changed the time automatically. So I unlocked another and it was different to the first. I unlocked another and that was different too. And so was the fourth.
I ended up relying on my faithful wristwatch, which relies on a tried-and-tested mechanical movement created hundreds of years ago and has no 'automatic adjustment' capability. Satisfied that by the fact that it was displaying 10am BST I realised that it was in actuality 9am GMT, which meant that one of the phones had changed, another hadn't changed, and the other two had somehow confused their timezones and changed to something different altogether.
The moral of the story, of course, is that simplicity of design wins hands-down, even if it creates the minor inconvenience of having to wind the hands back and forth twice a year. The mobile that changed to the correct time automatically was my Nokia N97 which for anyone who owns one will appreciate is the most unreliably buggy phone in existence and requires rebooting twice daily, hardly convenient!
PS. I don't 'where a watch' either, I wear one! Can I use the 'moron' line here by any chance?
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"where a watch"? Don't know what you're talking about ;-)
Oh, to get up at 9am on a Sunday...
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I really hate the time change.
"More daylight hours in the day" they say. Baloney. There are still the same hours in the day. Just at a different time. "Saves money" they say. Baloney. Costs you more in lighting/heating because of the darker evenings. "Causes less accidents" they say. Baloney. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/09/04/2674576.htm
Animals don't recognise this human process of shifting times. Now you have to re-arrange your schedule to feed them, otherwise you get cats walking all over you demanding their breakfasts (voice of experience) and the fox sitting on the wall waiting for his dinner (again voice of experience).
Personally I would prefer to stick with one time zone. GMT seems suitable to me. After all we do have the line copper line running through Greenwich which is supposed to signify something important. If you need extra daylight, get up earlier.
If everybody travelled out of sync (some earlier, some later) then there wouldn't be as much crowding on the trains and underground. We could all get a seat. Less peak traffic (lower accidents). Who ever decided that we should all be 9-5 people?
[Now where did that soapbox come from? *jumps down*]
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I agree mostly. Not sure about the 9-5 bit though. You can kind of see why those up above might want all their workers in the building at (roughly) the same times.
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How dare you complain about anything that's present on the beautiful UK HTC Hero. :P
The best looking android phone, and it's not available in the States.
That being said, I'm _sure_ there's a way to turn off that animation somehow. Since it's a system widget, it's probably in the global settings somewhere, maybe.
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I liberated myself from time over the past several months. Fortunately, work doesn't mind if I show up an hour early or an hour late. As long as the work gets done and I keep it within reason. So I stopped setting the alarm on the clock, stopped paying attention so much to the hour I turn in and generally just try to wake with the sun and get on with my day.
So far nobody has complained and the one time I was really late for work was because I had to spend a half hour discussing the status of a closed credit card account with the bank. Long and stupefying story.
That said - the whole time change concept should be stuffed in the bin and set ablaze. I can only too painfully believe our congress wasted time CHANGING the dates around a couple years back, thus creating a cascade of software changes around the world for US bound systems... nonsense and bother....
But, for now I'm free from time till the State mandates otherwise (soon to follow no doubt). :-)
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Jake,
I own a similar phone, and had similar issues. Until i switched of using network time in the settings.
Give that a try?
Rgrds,
Arno
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No luck Arno. Still animates. For now I'll continue living with a clock-sized empty space on the phone.
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