John Karahalis [:openjck] Reporter
	Description • 11 years ago

On the date screen of the first time experience, the user needs to choose a timezone based on the name of a major city. Some other operating systems use this interface (I know Ubuntu does), but I do not like the interface even there.

Imagine a user who lives in Trenton, NJ. What should he choose? The answer is not obvious, and somehow choosing New York seems wrong -- he doesn't live in New York, after all.

These are just the thoughts that ran through my head the first time I saw this sort of interface. Are there better alternatives? Maybe just the names of timezones, like "Eastern Time Zone", "Pacific Time Zone", etc.?

	Dave Hylands [:dhylands]
	Comment 1 • 11 years ago

It's also really painful to scroll to the very bottom of the list in order to choose Vancouver.

	Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)
	Comment 2 • 11 years ago

Currently we display time zone names from the IANA Time Zone Database, which uses major cities as the primary identifiers for most time zones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

However, the TZ Database also contains aliases like "US/Pacific" (alias of "America/Los_Angeles") and "Canada/Pacific" (alias of "America/Vancouver") that are closer to the official, well-known names for these time zones.

I would suggest we should initially list only the most populous time zones in each region, each under an alias or other name that matches the one used within that time zone.  Users who can't find their time zone in that list could tap on a "More..." option to see the complete list of IANA names and aliases.

	Ted Clancy [:tedders1]
	Comment 3 • 9 years ago

I think a better solution would be to use CLDR metazones, and I'm marking this a duplicate of Bug 1201254.