Eric Seelye
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This needs to be fixed. As commented below by John on March 2016 - yes over three years ago, "To me it's a bug...". Even if this type of functionality was intentional, I agree it's simply a BUG.
Why? I live in Germany UTC+1 however my employment is actually in the Eastern USA UTC-5. I use ManicTime on my Android phone to track phone calls and locations. The phone is in German time. My office computer is set to the Eastern USA. So when I look at my timelines all my phone activity is offset, but not like you would expect. NOTE: I have a client/server deployment with ManicTime Server in Eastern USA.
For examplem my 08:00 phone activity in Germany shows up on my USA based ManicTime server as 14:00. Which is actually completely backwards. 08:00 in Germany is actually 02:00 in the Eastern USA. This is very confusing and difficult to account for. Also Germany isn't always six hours off from Eastern USA. Sometimes its only five hours (Germany and USA don't change to/from Daylight Saving Time on the same schedule). If ManicTime really does store everything in UTC and only presents it to us via the client then why is there a difference between these timelines. My phone times are clearly being stored with the wrong UTC offset. My phone data is being misrepresented in the Windows desktop client as happening 12 hours later than it really did. This is clearly a bug and requires immediately attention. I don't know if it's the ManicTime Server or Android client that is causing this issue.
I'm sure I'm not the only person traveling with their phone, or what about people who live near a timezone border and their phone automatically adjusts by 1 hour. Those people's phone time lines must be all messed up. Clearly the server is taking the phone data and improperly modifying it and NOT storing in proper UTC.
As for changing timezones and the affect on statistics. In my case the statistic reports are mostly generated by servers. So changing the server timezone would be the only situation we'd have a problem. We don't move our server so I don't see a huge need.
As for users of just the desktop product then if the user changes their timezone, how about displaying a warning? Ultimately I certainly understand how statistical reports based on "e.g. who arrived to work the earliest" could be confusing with multi-time-zone groups but this goes back to the Server setups. For desktop users if they move locations then the statistics are probably less important. Regarless, as more and more of us work from various worldwide locations, this simply needs to be addressed logically and failing to adhere to UTC is no longer possible for a product such as ManicTime.
I would argue this is the biggest issues for ManicTime right now. The product works great otherwise and huge benefit for us. Thank you for a great product. Now let's take it to the next level and make it work for worldwide organizations.
The title of this thread is Display in UTC. I really think the applications should allow us to display in whatever timezone we want and permit that we change timezones freely. It would be shortsighted to deploy this feature as "local timezone or UTC". This features should really titled "Display in ANY timezone"
Don't let this reply negate or hide the fact there is a bug with how Android timelines are saved on a server when the android and server are in different timezones. There is clearly a bug somewhere.