It appears that after a 4 hour brain-bashing, brainstorm party in my head I was finally able to untangle the entire timestamping feature and now it works! I have personally tested it out by using all 12 hour offset positive and negative and all had worked for me. I spoke in detail about this feature but I will repeat it here and then go into even further detail now that I believe it to be 100%.
I really wanted to incorporate timestamping for a couple of reasons. One, AIM and other desktop IM systems include a timestamp with each message and I again, I am trying to include as many features of those softwares as I can in Mercury System. And two, I was receiving message before timestamping and if I had been away for a while (even if in away mode), I would come back to messages that may have been from another day or atleast a couple of hours. There was no way of knowing. Currently the timestamps do not include the date but do have the hours, minutes and seconds. But the date of the message isn't really essential and if someone is going to be away from the computer for that long, hopefully they will sign out of the system anyway.
The program takes the time of the server and then will add or subtract your time offset to get YOUR time. The server is set in a particular timezone and to make this really work as a worldwide solution so that someone from anywhere in the world can make the times match their local time. There is an options window for timestamping which shows the current time on the server. Then there are two dropdown boxes, one for plus or minus and one for the actual number of hours difference there is between the user's time and the server's time. If the server's time is ahead of yours, you would select the negative sign in the first dropdown box and vice versa if your time is ahead. You then set the second dropdown box to the number of hours difference there is and then click the button.
As you message, the software will take into account your pal's time offset so that all of the timestamps in their IM window will be set to their time while the messages in your window will be all in your time zone.
I then had to change how the time is displayed on the timestamping options window because it was showing 24 hour times (such as: 2am was 2 but 2pm was 14. I didn't want the hours to show up as 14:35:12. Instead it now would read 2:35:12 PM instead).
The problem which I had been having which I also believe to be alleviated was that a handfull of hours during each day it would show AM instead of PM and PM instead of AM. Not good. But it's changed now so all is well.
I love the style of your blog.
... that's about all I can think of to say.
» Praetorian on 2006-10-29 10:02:36
yay! i'm so glad you finally figured it out. I know it was causing you a lot of grief there, but at least now you can actually move on.
» lazypuppy on 2006-10-29 10:22:46
keep up the progress! Is the timestamp compliant w/daylight savings time?
» JMC on 2006-10-29 10:57:37
Hmmm who cares! Let's move to Arizona with no daylight savings. I hope you got some sleep after the four hour timestamp tango. :)
» ryan444123 on 2006-10-29 03:48:45
Sorry, you do not have permission to comment.
If you are a member, try logging in again or accessing this page here.
