Using Due’s Natural Date Parser For Time Conversion
A large portion of my users are based in the States, while I’m based in Singapore myself.
The huge time difference means that announcements made at what seemed like a convenient time for myself (say 3 PM) means an unearthly hour for users on the other end of the world (3 AM in New York, 12 midnight in San Francisco).
Many news websites face the same issue, and they adopt a strategy to post a tweet at different hours of the day in hope to catch their users around the world at a convenient time.
I’m hopeless at time conversion. Thankfully, the natural date parser in Due understands timezone.
If I thought 10 AM made a good time for an announcement, I could schedule a reminder to do a retweet at 10 AM PDT for users in the West Coast, or 10 AM EDT for users in the East, just by typing that directly into the reminder.
Due would then automatically* convert the time to your local time in the reminder’s due date.
This is also handy when you wish to convert timings of product announcements, such as Apple’s Keynotes, to local time.
*If you’re on iOS, you need to tap on the button that appears near the top of the window (eg. ‘Set to 10am PDT’) to set the date and time of your reminder to the detected date and time.
If you’ve any interesting use case or tips to share with fellow users, I’d like to hear from you.
