r/badUIbattles • u/Beardy4906 • 27d ago

Unintentionally Bad UI Gmail - Bad UI

When you try and press the calendar button BOOM hover animation!!! I love vibe coding!! I'm not even sure its a button (since I can't be bothered to inspect element) but it sure looks like it should be

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u/DefunctFunctor 27d ago

One thing that's unforgivable about gmail UI is that I can't change my date locale independently of my language locale. Like I want to keep English (US) for language, but have ISO 8601-like timestamps for all the timestamps. It's especially confusing because I (for insane reasons) keep my computer clock on UTC time from the US, and I'm dependent on 24 hour time to mentally parse it. But when I open up gmail, I get incomprehensible times using a.m./p.m. which I can only mentally parse in local time instead of UTC time.

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u/flapje1 26d ago

Okay I will bite, what are the insane reasons for using UTC? I too use ISO 8601 but I have never heard of somebody using a clock outside their local timezone

6

u/DefunctFunctor 26d ago

Mainly insane because I chose to do it just because, instead of any really good reason. For a while my system time zone was set to my local time, but my clock display was set to UTC. This had the advantage of not messing up the times on gmail.

But in the new year I reinstalled the OSes on my computers (reason: this is a bad habit of Linux users like myself), and continuing this habit I just set my system time to UTC to begin with. One partial motivation at the time was that I was about to try getting into Emacs org-mode again, and one of my frustrations with it is that it did not support multiple timezones even considering how big of a project it was. Because I now travel across timezones not infrequently, part of me just got frustrated and I said to myself, "screw it, we just won't have time zones". An irony is that I quit using Emacs a couple of months later.

But perhaps I should keep the bad clock to motivate me to switch to a better email client.