Suggested iCal Improvements

Question

This is not a question, but observations about how iCal can be improved.
While iCal is perfectly acceptable for day-to-day tasks in the same time
zone, it presents the user with very serious deficiencies when the
task(s) involve more than one time zone. This point was made forcibly
during a recent trip from the East Coast of the US to Australia. During
this trip, the following shortcomings were noted:
1) Although time zone can be specified when making an event entry, it is
not possible to later edit that time zone. Therefore, if the initial
entry of an event was made in the wrong time zone, the only option is to
completely re-enter the event, which can be problematic if it has a lot
of notes/links, like a hotel or rental car reservation.
2) Only one time zone is permitted per event. This does not work well
when traveling by air where you start in one time zone and end in
another. A better implementation would be to default both time zones to
the time zone selected in preferences, but allow them to be changed for
BOTH the start AND end times. (Another feature that would be nice to
have is a readout of actual elapsed time of an event--how long is it
from the time I get on a jet at midnight Thursday at LAX and arrive at
8:00 AM Saturday in Australia? But then again, do I really want to
know?!)
3) When changing time zones in the date/time preferences, it changes the
days and times for all events in iCal to reference whatever time zone is
set, regardless of the time zone selected when the event was created. It
would be better to have events reference the time zone in which they
were created. For example, I'm in Australia, but have a meeting
scheduled in Washington DC on Wednesday night; however, while I'm in
Australia the calendar indicates the meeting is on Thursday (referencing
the Australian time selected in preferences), which causes confusion if
I'm communicating with someone in DC about the meeting. Likewise, when
creating an event in a different time zone (e.g., events in Australia
while on the US East Coast), the events will show up a day later than
they are entered because that's what time it will be on the East Coast
when they occur in Australia. The best solution would be to default to
showing all events relative to the time zone selected when they were
created (both beginning and ending) and perhaps have an option to "see"
what time that will be relative to the time zone selected in
preferences.
Making these three changes to iCal would make it MUCH more traveler
friendly.

Answer 1

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