24 Hour time in Haiku.

NOTE: In retrospect, this issue turned out to be a good example of how not to interact with a volunteer development community. It was a humbling lesson for myself that I followed up with an apology to the development mailing list, not because I was asked to, but because I felt my behavior warranted it and the rest of the development community deserved it. Read the rest of this article while keeping that in mind. Thanks.

After a question in #haiku today I went on a long quest to figure out why 24 hour time settings weren't immediately present under Time preferences when I right clicked on the clock.

First I posted on a previous ticket about 24 hour time in the Deskbar, where I learned that the option was in fact present in Haiku, but had been removed from the Time preferences and was to be found now only in the Locale settings. When I was pointing out that this was still bad design and should be fixed, I was told to stop hijacking closed tickets and go create my own... so I did.

https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/8769

Humorously, and as is sadly my inefficient and overly verbose style, I started out by making a long argument about usability... then actually did an informal survey which ended up completely supporting my previous assertions (basically everyone looks at the clock settings first when they want to change a time related setting)... and only in the end did I place the proverbial cherry on top... pointing out with a screen capture that even BeOS R5 gets it right. The very operating system that Haiku very closely bases its design off.

As the ticket points out at length, Windows also gets it wrong and has for years... but at least 2 of the Linux desktop environments I checked did get it right, placing the option easily accessible under Time & Date preferences.

I also did some more digging after that because I wanted to understand the reasoning behind this option being removed, which led me to this exchange on the source commits mailing list: http://www.freelists.org/post/haiku-commits/haiku-hrev43984-srcappsdeskbar (scroll all the way to the bottom to the "Other related posts:" section that shows the rest of the discussion)

What that discussion doesn't take into account however is that this is not merely a subjective change like whether or not someone likes the AM or PM showing, or if they want some separator other than :, or if they want to show seconds or not.

This is an international standard time keeping format that is a necessity in numerous fields in every country around the world, regardless of what other standard they might use. It is a fundamentally basic option.

The 24-hour clock is commonly used [in countries where 12 hour notation is generally used] only in some specialist areas (military, aviation, navigation, tourism, meteorology, astronomy, computing, logistics, emergency services, hospitals), where the ambiguities of the 12-hour notation are deemed too inconvenient, cumbersome, or outright dangerous, with the military's use being the most famous example.

Treating it like some meaningless fluff tweaking option totally fails to understand the issue at hand.

Now with that hopefully settled (and hopefully fixed soon)... I can get back to my Icon-O-Matic UI refactoring mock-ups. And then back to the Qupzilla Haiku theme to go along with the icon I already did for it (which you can see me editing in Icon-O-Matic in the screenshot in my previous post). Busy busy...