FJ Software

March 11th is the date Daylight Savings begins here, and clocks will move forward one hour. I have two problems with calendar syncing with MyPhoneExplorer (1.8.2, 18/02/2012) between Rainlendar and an Android phone (Sony Xperia Ray).


Problem 1:
This is an issue between Rainlendar and MyPhoneExplorer, and the phone always shows the same as MyPhoneExplorer.

Recurring events sometimes appear a day later than they should. If I make an event in Rainlendar on Wednesday, March 7th at 19:00 recurring every Wednesday, after syncing it appears in MyPhoneExplorer every Thursday.

If I move the event in Rainlendar to the following Wednesday (March 14th) it shows up correctly in MyPhoneExplorer. The difference seems to be that March 14 is after the switch to Daylight Savings.

If I change the event to 'all day', it shows up correctly. If I move the event to earlier in the day, it also works correctly.

I'm having the problem now with my Android phone, but it was the same with my last phone, a Sony W890.


Problem 2:
This is an issue between MyPhoneExplorer and the Android calendar, since MPE and Rainlendar both show the same.

Any events I create after March 11 (the date of the DST change) appear in the Android calendar an hour before they should.

For example, if I create an event for March 6th at 10:00 AM in MPE and sync with the phone, it appears the same in Android. If I move the event to March 13th in MPE and sync, it appears in Android as March 13th at 9:00AM.

Recurring events also behave strangely. If I make and event in MPE on March 7th recurring every Wednesday at 12:00, it appears on the phone correctly on the 7th, but every recurrence on the 14th or later appears at 13:00.

If I make the same event on the phone, all recurrences appear at 12:00. If I then sync to MPE, they all also appear at 12:00.

1) MyPhoneExplorer does export only the UTC Time, without Timezone information. Maybe this is the reason for the problems. I could not reproduce the problem with my rainlendar so maybe there is a default timezone setting for rainlendar ?

2) Must be a problem of the android calendar, check also your timezone settings of the phone. The calendar database of Android is based also on UTC Timestamps so the daylight saving times should make no problems

I think I've figured out problem 1, and it does relate to UTC.

It seems MPE creates the recurring events on the day corresponding to the UTC, not the local time of the event. This means that in my time zone (UTC-5), any event after 19:00 takes place on the following day, as measured in UTC, and MPE creates the recurring event on that day.

This leads to strange behaviour in MPE, where the event displays on (for example) Wednesday, March 7th at 20:00, but the recurring events appear on Thursdays.

This problem is probably rare in UTC+1 time zones, where only recurring events from 00:00 to 01:00 would be incorrect, but it's becomes much more likely as you get to time zones farther away.

It seems the only correct behaviour would be to set recurring events on the day as measured in local time zone. Rainlendar doesn't actually have a setting for time zone, and just uses the Windows time zone.

I've investigate a bit more about problem 2 and can add some more info.

There are many people on various forums who have complained about Android's calendar doing odd things around daylight savings, particularly when syncing with the online calendar, so there is probably something odd about Android's calendar, independent of MPE.

It's possible to get Android's calendar to show events after March 11 at the same time as MPE by disabling syncing with network time in the Android settings, but I'm not sure how this will affect the changeover on the 11th.

However, it still seems odd that events created in Android show correctly, while those synced from MPE are off by an hour. I can't see what the UTC of the events are in Android, so I'm not able to look into it any more than that.

There is also a 'time zone' field for each event in Android (under the 'More' property tab) that affects what time it appears. It's even possible to specify "Eastern Time" or "Eastern Standard Time", which changes the date events appear. Maybe there's is something related to that.

Are the differences between the phone and MyPhoneExplorer or between MyPhoneExplorer and Rainlendar ?

Whole-day-events are always related to UTC, the Android internal calendar does create this events also with UTC-Timezone setting

I assume you're asking about problem 1, which is the recurring events showing up on the wrong day.

The difference is between Rainlendar and MPE.

The problem doesn't happen at all with whole-day events. It only happens with events that begin between 19h00 and 24h00 (in my time zone, UTC-5), and have a recurrence defined.

If I create an single event in Rainlendar on Tuesday at 20h00 and sync, it shows up correctly in MPE. If I then add a recurrence for the event in Rainlendar for every week, then sync, the event shows up every Wednesday in MPE.

I noticed problem 2 on my XP computer, but everything is fine on the Windows 7 computer. So, I believe this issue is related to the OS.
I worked around it by setting the wrong time zone on my XP machine and then overriding the time to be correct.
I suppose I will have to do this twice a year.