Monday, March 10, 2014

Daylight Saving Time is Coming this Sunday - Are Your Devices Prepared? Part II

I must say Bravo!!

Every year, I perform a very simple experiment, I directly add events to my calendar on the day before and the day of the Daylight Saving Time change, I also generate entries through Infuzer enabled links as well as syncing accounts to my handheld (Android) device.  I then re-visit those entries and see how many of them incorrectly adjusted during the time change.

For the first time, all the test entries added to my calendars moved correctly during the DST change over the weekend.  This bodes very well for all those folks traveling through airports this week, as messed up flight departure times in electronic calendars have wreaked havoc on travelers and the Infuzer support team over the last few years.  It looks like Microsoft and the rest of the technology community finally caught up with the logic of how to have calendar entries behave.  Even my pre-DST appointment entries behaved themselves.


If your Microsoft products did not fare as well, check the Daylight Saving Time Help and Support Center at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst for help and support on how to update your Windows computer for Daylight Savings Time (DST).

Thursday, March 6, 2014

Daylight Saving Time is Coming this Sunday - Are Your Devices Prepared? Part I

Don't be late because your calendar appointments didn't behave nicely across all of your electronic devices, inevitably certain devices will mishandle or not handle the time change at all.

Here in the United States we are approaching the onset of Daylight Saving Time (although Daylight Savings Time is now acceptable, the correct usage is to omit the "s" on saving). This custom of springing forward our clocks by one hour at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning not only means you lose an hour of sleep, it can mean you can't trust those alarm reminders for your appointments. Outlook calendars are notorious for botching this conversion, especially on Windows XP machine with Office 2003 that needed patching to their logic when George Bush modified the dates in 2005.

This is part I of this topic as I look to see how well my connected life stays in sync during the coming weekend, as I will compare the performance of my Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007, Google Calendar and Android Calendar as well as cross-synced appointments across devices.  Please feel free to post your experiences in the comments sections, and please remember not to set any appointments for 2:30 AM on Sunday morning.