Proper handling of timezone information
This could be rather technical so please bare with me :-). I have done many treks and runs all over the world, and one issue I notice with Gaia and almost all other hiking and sport activity trackers, is that the date/time thats is displayed is always changing based on your current timezone. An example would be my multi day Routerburn trek in New Zealand from 2 years back (image below). The time on the Title (which I manually add as a habit to make sure I see the correct local time when I did the trek) is the actual time when I started the trek in New Zealand at the time I was there. The time shown below that is the recorded time based on UTC but displayed to me as a result of me now sitting in Texas, which is on a different timezone.
Whats more is that it I were to look at the trek after November 1st, the time would be displayed as me starting the trek at 5/13/18 at 16:21:39 because of daylight savings time.
When I look at the export gpx, Gaia is properly storing the timestamp in UTC but unfortunately this does not include the timezone + daylight savings time (if any) offset. While Gaia is following the standards in storing the timestamp in ISO 8601 format, it should also include the timezone offset time that the format allows (e.g: "-05:00" or "+01:00") which is also included in ISO format (e.g.: 2018-01-01T18:22:00-05:00). This offset should be stored as another column so when exporting the trek to GPX you include that based on the timezone offset on your phone at the time of the trek. When you display the time, it would not impact what you project on screen and rather show the actual date and time I did the trek based on local timezone information from the phone.
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I guess this indirectly answers my questions. … I guess.
The data is recorded in UTC time but is displayed with the current local time of where you are viewing the data. This is indeed very confusing. Somewhere I would record the timezone that the user wants to view the data. For example, I’m currently in Texas but I want to view things as if I was in Germany. I don’t want to constantly be subtracting 7 hours from all the times displayed all of the time.
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