The problem with being a developer is I like slinging code more than I like writing blog posts (evidently). This has got to change because when I am interested in trying out a new Internet application I often check the blog as a first sign of the App being abandoned. if I see there hasn’t been any posts for a while I often think the App might not have much time left on this earth and wonder if it is worth trying at all. So I am kicking myself for not updating this blog more since Noopsi is most definitely still under heavy development.

Since our last blog post we have pushed out two significant updates that fixed tons of bugs and added some new features, but you might not have noticed because we didn’t put out any formal notice.

Now, what are we up to right now? Well, Noopsi is having issues with iCal feeds not getting the correct times. They send the correct time in UTC but calendars like Google Calendar (the calendar application I happen to use) use your set timezone to override the feed timezone. This makes all my iCal feeds from Noopsi six hours off. So, after some research I mapped out how to fix this and mumbled to myself, “this should only take a couple hours.” Well, four full days later I am almost done fixing it.

What was the problem you ask? Well, Our goal was to make Noopsi dirt simple to use. So simple you shouldn’t even have to spend any time setting boring config stuff like your timezone. In keeping with this goal Noopsi would snoop your timezone offset automatically. This works if you just want an offset and you update it every now and again to account for changes like Daylight Savings Time. This doesn’t work if DST has switched over and Noopsi hasn’t updated the offset yet. Or if you don’t have Javascript enabled. Or if Noopsi happens to need the timezone (e.g. “America/Denver”) rather than the offset.

Turns out the easiest way to tackle all these hurdles is to make the timezone manually set by the user (boo!) so Noopsi always gets it right without any hiccups. It took a good bit of code re-writes and additions to get Noopsi to allow manually setting your timezone and although we’re sad that Noopsi can no longer do this automatically, in the long run we know it is the best way to make sure Noopsi doesn’t mess up your dates.

The good news? We are almost done with this and Noopsi will soon be updated. The bad news? All user’s timezones will be blank until they manually set their timezone in the settings.

So, I guess this concludes the Noopsi state of the Union. Remember, feel free to contact us with any question, comments, and feature suggestions you might have.