Solve time zones too.

Khan Academy lets users login using either their Google or Facebook account. Only one of those identity providers gives us access to the current user’s time zone offset. It’s not Google.

This drives me nuts because dealing with time zones is a ridiculous developer time sink, there’s no reason to ask our users to give us their TZ info again when they’ve already done it once, and getting the user’s TZ offset should be one of the biggest rewards given to devs for using a popular identity provider.

Developer after developer has been made miserable by Kentucky’s weird time zones or daylight saving time or some new law passed in some unheard-of country that magically turns yesterday into today. I won’t even bother doing that cute blog thing where you make every word a different link to prove your point because this entire post would be links.

The iPhone’s alarm suffered from one of the most recent high-profile time zone bugs.

As a developer, I am certain that whenever I work on another project that needs to choose an identity provider, I’m only choosing those that have obtained and are willing to hand me the user’s time zone. It’s too restrictive to be forced to rely on “6 hours ago”-style relative dates, especially when trying to display detailed charts over time. It’s too ridiculous to go through the pain of solving the same headaches thousands of other developers have solved just for the chance to bug your users with yet another time zone dropdown.

I’ll be thrilled if Google App Engine hands out time zone offsets for its users. Until then, Khan Academy’s profiles will use some unfortunate javascript hackery to show users their time-based charts with reasonable time zone behavior.