The current mockup is:

Which I've done as a rough working mockup:

Obviously that's *really* rough, but IMHO it's still a bit cluttered and it's given me a few thoughts.

I change the timezone constantly. I have to change it everytime I go away/back from a conference. Easily 10 times a year.

Because more and more computers are internet connected, very very few people actually need to manually set the time; and if they do, only once.

Yet we give choosing the time the most prominence and screen estate.

---

If you are manually setting the date, most people will copy a date from their phone/calendar/sundial I don't think visualising a grid of days has any value in this case.

I think 5 regular spin boxes for date/time would be far more convenient for keyboard and mouse users.
Or a line edit with a input mask? Or even tumblers http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/images/tumbler.png ?

It could be inline and only visible or when you don't have NTP set or a popup dialog on a button only enabled when relevant

---

I did that a rough draft as:

Thoughts?

In T7248#142631, @davidedmundson wrote:

The current mockup is:

Which I've done as a rough working mockup:

Obviously that's *really* rough, but IMHO it's still a bit cluttered and it's given me a few thoughts.

I change the timezone constantly. I have to change it everytime I go away/back from a conference. Easily 10 times a year.

Because more and more computers are internet connected, very very few people actually need to manually set the time; and if they do, only once.

Yet we give choosing the time the most prominence and screen estate.

---

If you are manually setting the date, most people will copy a date from their phone/calendar/sundial I don't think visualising a grid of days has any value in this case.

I think 5 regular spin boxes for date/time would be far more convenient for keyboard and mouse users.
Or a line edit with a input mask? Or even tumblers http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/images/tumbler.png ?

It could be inline and only visible or when you don't have NTP set or a popup dialog on a button only enabled when relevant

---

I did that a rough draft as:

Thoughts?

I like this idea Dave! It takes away a few elements on the screen that aren't really necessary, all things considered. If this page is about setting your time zone, then let's do that. Can we maybe convey the calendar at the top and also the time? Just so that it is pretty prominent what you set? For example, keep what you made the same, just as part of a title add something like what we have in the lock screen:

Monday, January 1st, 2018 - 10:15 AM (Mountain Time)

Thank you,

Andy

+1 for adapting to modern workflows; I have the same issue and only touch this KCM when I travel, whereupon the current workflow is awkward.

A really nice feature might be if it can automatically figure out the timezone too, based on your IP address when you have an internet connection. Then that case would be handled automatically on your desktop machine just like it is with your phone, and both the "manually set timezone and date/time" features would be even more secondary in importance.

In T7248#142653, @ngraham wrote:

+1 for adapting to modern workflows; I have the same issue and only touch this KCM when I travel, whereupon the current workflow is awkward.

A really nice feature might be if it can automatically figure out the timezone too, based on your IP address when you have an internet connection. Then that case would be handled automatically on your desktop machine just like it is with your phone, and both the "manually set timezone and date/time" features would be even more secondary in important.

A big +1 from me on this thought! This KCM should only be used if the automatic feature didn't work. Or maybe you're under a VPN.

A really nice feature might be if it can automatically figure out the timezone too, based on your IP address when you have an internet connection.

It's come up a bunch of times. It's not do-able without external web services. That's always a very difficult grey area in Plasma.
But there is code in plasma's location dataengine that makes it technically do-able fairly easily.

In any case that will be a non visual thing so somewhat unrelated to this; other than the addition of a checkbox.

for the timezone, it could be a view like calamares:

instead of the ugly 2 comboboxes , a search field which would highlight matching cities (somehow should be keepable also the list of cities not sure)

possible mockups of

1. default view
2. searching for a city
3. custom datetime settings

(Note is just gimped, i don't know if is possible or how much complicated/messy/hard would be to do)

Very nice!

I feel like having actual controls to help people choose the time may still be useful. Not everyone is going to be pasting a time from their KDE connect-connected Android smartphone. It would be very annoying if I had to type a time into an unstructured text field, not knowing whether my input would be accepted--and if not, having to irritatingly re-type or adjust it.

Instead, perhaps we could keep the add a time control (just like there's already a calendar-based date control), but allow some field to accept pastes for common date and time formats as a hidden accelerator feature?

In T7248#143160, @mart wrote:

possible mockups of

1. default view
2. searching for a city
3. custom datetime settings
   
   (Note is just gimped, i don't know if is possible or how much complicated/messy/hard would be to do)
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

I like this! I take what Nate mentioned as well.

I shall look into the map selection UI with some sort of table filtering / completion system.

I'm not adding a calendar widget and a clock without any justification on why we should show a calendar and a clock.

It would be great if the new KCM UI would be convergent, so we could use it for Plasma Mobile as well, given it's being redesigned anyway.

Currently we have our own custom time module on Plasma Mobile, and it's the last part that depends on kdelibs4support, so it would need a partial rewrite rather soon. I think the better way to go might be designing this kcm in a way that it can simply be shared between mobile and desktop form factors.

Sorry in case this is out of scope for this task.