1.02.2010

One minor quibble.

It's not a big thing, it just annoys me very very slightly.

My Gmail page looks messy. Let me explain. At the end of every email line after the name and subject is the time or date of the email. If it came that day then it shows the time, if it is another day it usually shows the date in Month (abbreviated word) and date format eg. Dec 22. Or perhaps 22 Dec, I don't have an example to look up now, the reason for which I'll get to shortly.

Now, if the email is not from that year, then the format is date/month/year (digit form). I'm not complaining about the order, it's in the right order, it should be date/month/year and anything else is an abomination. Sorry Americans. No, my problem is with the way it looks. Being the second day of the year and a long weekend, I have one from today at 15:11 and all the others are from last year. I have a bunch of 31/12/09 then 30/12/9 etc etc. I have a page full of numbers and back slashes and it just isn't pretty!

Like I said, minor quibble.

3 comments:

Barry Leiba said...

«Sorry Americans.»

We are not "sorry Americans". Anyway, the date format follows your language setting (on the Settings -> General page). You probably have yours set to "English (UK)", so you get the dd/mm/yyyy format. Mine is set to "English (US)", so I get the "mm/dd/yyyy" format, even though I agree with you that it's a stupid order.

But, happy days, there's a "labs" feature (you can enable it on the Settings -> Labs page) that lets you set the date format separately from the language, and you then have the choice of those two, and also "yyyy-mm-dd".

Barry Leiba said...

Oh, but even with the Custom Date Formats labs feature enabled, you can't get rid of the year. I think they should omit the year if the date is within the last four months. Maybe I'll suggest that to the guy who wrote the labs feature.

Michelle said...

I guess it's set to whatever it was automatically set to, because I've never adjusted that. At least I don't remember doing it.. perhaps I did.. anyway:

*I'm not claiming that that's the way it is on gmail, I was just clearing up that the date order wasn't what I was particularly quibbling with on the time.

*I wasn't suggesting that American's are sorry, I was saying sorry to Americans for insulting the date order that Americans typically use, at least in my experience of Americans.

* I might be able to adjust it, but it will fix itself soon enough when the year gets a bit older and I have more emails from this year, but thanks for the suggestion.

* Oh right.. I can't do it anyway. Oh well. Thanks all the same :)

* I hope I'm not coming across as necessarily argumentative in this reply, I just thought you might have misunderstood some of the points I made, due entirely to me and my poor writing skills, of course :)

* Happy New Year! (again)