Menu Bar - Poor Display of Day, Month, Date and Time (wrong order)

[Terje Andre Arnøy]

This is a simple papercut, as this is a need to change the default in how the date and time is displayed. If you have Day/Date/Time shown in the indicator, the date number is placed after the month. This is right next to the time display and there are too many numbers in a row (see attachment). This probably because of the english convention of using "April First" instead of "First of April".

Solution:
Change display from Day/Month/Date/Clock to Day/Date/Month/Clock.

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

Links to this bug; https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-datetime/+bug/750745

In my panel I see Day DayOfMonth Month Time

[Chris Wilson (notgary-deactivatedaccount)]

Changing the format of the date/time indicator won't solve this problem since the format will change depending on which locale has been set up (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country). Separating the date and time with a comma would be a better idea.

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

Reference to the code: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~indicator-applet-developers/indicator-datetime/trunk/view/head:/src/utils.c#L243

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

This is a locale issue, and only seems to happen in the US locale case, not very sure about what is the best approach here

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Interesting problem. Do the clocks in Windows, Mac OS X, Gnome Shell, KDE, etc have the same problem? If not, why not, and if so, how do they solve it?

[Cathy Koller (cathy-koll)]

Users should be able to select what format they want the date to be displayed in. For example, if user selects Day/Month/Year format (29/Sep/2011), then the panel should display with that format.

[Javier Jardón (jjardon)]

@Cathy:

We already allow that, simply put your prefered format using dconf-editor and modify the com/canonical/indicator/datetime/custom-time-format

@Matthew:

In gnome-shell they put a comma between the date and the hour, for example:
Thu Oct 13, 17:32

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I have updated the specification to address the specific complaint of the date and time numbers running together: if either the weekday *or* the date is present, they should be separated from the time, not by an inelegant comma, but by an en space. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeAndDate?action=diff&rev2=48&rev1=47>

As for the order of the date components: I'm all in favor of settings to customize that order independently of the locale. But those settings shouldn't apply only to the clock menu. They should also apply to Thunderbird and Evolution and Nautilus and any other compliant program that shows dates. That's a hard problem: the GNU locale system just isn't as sophisticated as the Windows or Mac number formatting systems. So it would be tempting to add a setting just for this menu. But I don't think it would be important enough to clutter the Clock tab.

[Bob Owen (bobowen)]

Proposed merged that changes space between date and time to a Unicode en space as per updated specification.

[Bob Owen (bobowen)]

Comment #11: merged should read merge

It is really annoying that I don't seem to be able to edit my comments.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Verified fixed in indicator-datetime 12.10.3daily13.02.01-0ubuntu1. Thanks Bob!