The same program as Time Zone v.1.2.3, but it runs under Windows Mobile 2005.
What is Time Zone
This program is for travelers and all the other persons that need to co-ordinate their time in the current location city and the other � target � city. Being a plug-in to Calendar program, Time Zone changes appointment start time so that in current city it corresponds to the time of appointment in its "target" city, which will be selected by user. This modification provides correct displaying of appointment start time after setting of "target" city as current one in Clock program ("Start/Settings/System/Clock/Time"). Time Zone adds also supplementary text to Location property of the appointment. This gives a user possibility to see "target" city for the appointment and it's time in this city.
How to use it
- General case
Let us suppose that you have to create appointment for some day for 3 p.m. in New York. But now you are in London and your pocket PC's current city is London (it is set in Clock).
Input appointment in Calendar for 3 p.m. and save it. Then select your appointment, tap and hold it, select "Change to City Time" item of menu, and then select New York. (In place of tap and hold you can use the same item in "Tools" menu of Calendar. This item will appear after program installation.) Time in Calendar will be changed to 10 a.m. (which corresponds to 3 p.m. in New York) and location property of the appointment will receive corresponding note. When you will move to New York and will set Clock's current city to New York, Clock program will suggest you to change time for all the appointments. Select "OK". Then Calendar changes the time to right one for New York (and you will see 3 p.m.).
To provide possibility to change later this new time to the other one, Time Zone adds supplementary text to Location property of the appointment. Template for the text has the following form:
"-->City_Name City_Local_Time (code)"
(e.g., "-- >London 12:15 (4)">). The user could feel free to change Location property of the appointment, but only its starting part (till the template). If during change of Location a template will be broken then automatic change of appointment time to the time of the other city will not be possible.
Please note that you may change "target" city many times. The local time (seen in supplement to location) for any new "target" city will remain initial. But Calendar time will be corrected to display such a current time that corresponds to appointment time in "target" city.
If you would like to change appointment start time for the target city that you selected in Time Zone previously then you should edit the time, save appointment and execute Time Zone once more selecting the same target city.
After finishing the process of changes, Calendar program will at first show previous state of appointment selected for changes (with previous location and start time). Then Calendar will refresh its window (after delay of about 3-7 seconds) and will display new status of the appointment.
All-day appointments
There is special processing for all-day appointments. Let us consider the whole story using one example. Let us suppose that your current city is Berlin, Germany (GMT+01.00). In the morning you create all-day event for today (let it be November 30). In the middle of the day you fly to London, Great Britain (GMT+00:00) and change your current city in the Clock to London. After "OK" there, you open your Calendar. You will find that your all-day event is moved to previous day (November 29).
To prevent this strange behavior of Calendar, Time Zone suggests you a special processing. When you select all-day event, program will move it to 00.00 a.m. of the same day in GMT-10.00 time zone. This will help to avoid changing of the date of all-day event in time zones from GMT-10.00 till GMT+12.00.
But there are bad news:
1. Special processing described above cannot be done for recurring all-day events.
2. Some programs will consider that corrected all-day event starts at November 30 and finishes at December 1, i.e. it will take two days (but 24 hours in total) instead of one. In addition, the end time of the appointment in this next day will be the more later the more is your shift in time from GMT+00.00. However, Calendar will show right day in any of time zones mentioned above. Nothing could be done in this situation automatically. As far as the author understands, this is a consequence of Calendar design for all-day events. Author of corresponding program should change logic of such a program to provide the same behavior for such events as in Calendar. You have the opportunity to cancel this special processing in Time Zone (it asks special questions for all-day events before changing time, you could reply "Cancel"). Then Time Zone will not do anything with selected appointment but you will still have the opportunity to change your dates manually.
Daylight saving time
The problem of daylight saving time (DST) is solved in the program in part only. It changes start time of the appointment using shift between time zones (e.g., we have 6 hours shift between GMT-05.00 and GMT+01.00 time zones) and information from DST check boxes. Main dialog window of the program has check boxes that allow user to show separately if DST is used in the city of current location and in target city. So, responsibility for DST correction falls on user.
When setting DST for current and target cities, user should take into account that difference between DST for source city (1 if set) and DST for target city (1 if set) is used in correction of start time of the appointment. So, if both source and target cities have the same DST user could leave both check boxes unchecked (or checked).
DST settings selected by user for the check boxes are stored in the registry.
Possible manual changes
If your city isn't in the list for selection, you could: a) select any city in the same time zone (recommended) because the main in this context is time zone or b) using Notepad manually add the city you need into the file "citylist.txt", which is located in program directory. In the last case you could use a record for the city in appropriate time zone as a pattern. Please take into account that the first field (the key) must be unique for every city. Select any new number for your city.
If from the other side you do not need some of the cities from the file mentioned above, you could delete corresponding records from the file. The smaller is this file, the faster is a process of creation of program dialog window. To avoid error message during the very first program run, you should not delete the first record (with key equal to 10). After the first run, you may delete this record too.
How to install Time Zone
This program has no installation part for desktop PC. Before installing you should provide that the following DLL files are copied into \Windows directory of your PDA: MFC90U.dll and msvcr90.dll. These are standard redistributable Microsoft library files.
To install Time Zone you should simply copy "TimeZone5.cab" file to your Pocket PC device using Microsoft ActiveSync program. After that, you should double tap the file name using any File Explorer.
The next statement is included into this text due to requirement of development environment license. The program was created with or relies on pre-release, time-sensitive unsupported software that may not operate correctly.
Program runs under Windows Mobile 2005 in portrait layout only.
The following files will be installed in "\Program Files\Time Zone" directory:
- TimeZone5.dll;
- ReadmeTimeZone5.txt (this file);
- WhatsNewTimeZone5.txt;
- citylist.txt;
- timezones.txt.
How to uninstall Time Zone
You can uninstall Time Zone by making Soft Reset and after that using "Remove Programs" from "Start/Settings/System". The name of the entry is "AleksSoft Time Zone".
You can:
a) Install and use the program on any number of computers.
b) Make copies of the program for backup purposes.
c) Make copies of the original downloaded file and distribute it for free to the other party. The other party agrees to these terms by its first use of the program.
You are not allowed to:
a) Modify or investigate the code of the program in any way.
b) Merge the program with another program.
c) Make copies of the original file you downloaded and distribute it (or link to the original file) for commercial purposes.
Update Description:
v1.3
1. Program runs under Windows Mobile 2005.
2. Minor improvements of the code.
v1.2.3
Thanks to Jean-Baptiste for testing under localised Windows Mobile 2003.
1. Processing under localised versions of OS.
2. Minor improvements of the code.
v1.2
Thanks to David for testing under Windows Mobile 2003.
1. Program runs under Pocket PC 2002 and Windows Mobile 2003.
2. Minor improvements of the code.
v1.1
Thanks to Jerome and Torgamm for the suggestion concerning Daylight Saving Time.
1. The problem of daylight saving time (DST) is solved in the program - but in part only. It changes start time of the appointment using shift between time zones (e.g., we have 6 hours shift between GMT-05.00 and GMT+01.00 time zones) and information from new check boxes. Previously program considered that current and target cities had the same DST status. Main dialog window of the program has check boxes that allow user to show separately if DST is used in the city of current location and in target city. So, responsibility for DST correction falls on user.
When setting DLT for current and target cities user should take into account that difference between DLT for source city (1 if set) and DLT for target city (1 if set) is used in correction of start time of the appointment. So, if both source and target cities have the same DLT user could leave both check boxes unchecked (or checked).
2. DST settings selected by user for the check boxes are stored in the registry.
3. Clarified the program behaviour for time change of previously processed appointment.
a) Let the program is used for the same target city that is already mentioned in TimeZone notes for Location property of appointment. Then the program consider that user have selected new time for the same target city and modifies the time in Calendar for current city accordingly.
b) Let user executes the program for the other target city than the one mentioned in notes for Location. Then program will use the time mentioned in TimeZone notes as the base.
c) If you would like to set new appointment time for new target city then when editing the appointment time you should delete TimeZone note from Location property of the appointment. TimeZone will create new note for your new target city.
4. Bug fixed: when DST is used, time correction for all-day events was made as for standard time, i.e. by 1 hour less than it should be.
5. Bug fixed: despite the message "Invalid timezone information for current city. Correction will be cancelled." invalid appointment time correction was made.
v1.0 - Initial release
