[Disclaimer: Apologies if my tone doesn’t land right below – I honestly don’t mean any offence, and this is not aimed personally at any posters, commenters, staff or community members; this is feedback intended for Tiller in terms of marketing and customer support. I expect they don’t have the resources to implement the things I’d like to see, and I wouldn’t expect volunteer members of a community who live and work in an entirely American context to feel they should support those of us out here across an ocean or two. BUT…]
It’s genuinely lovely that people are supporting each other with good attempts at workarounds, even if there does seem to be quite a lot of misunderstanding in the thread above about what direction the conversions are wanted to happen in. I’m in NZ, originally from the UK, although I do have one US bank account that will talk to Tiller. Unfortunately (and I guess this is an aspect of my flavour of being autistic flaring up here) I simply can’t tolerate seeing dates ‘backwards’ everywhere (i.e. in US format). I totally appreciate (now) that this is a US-centric product, but if I’d anticipated that this would be an issue I never would have signed up. In all honesty, for me the mix of dates, and dominance of the ‘wrong’ format (from my perspective) is just unbearable as a user experience and makes it near impossible for me to process the information I see without a great deal of cognitive effort I can’t afford.
The fact that the problem has been hard-coded throughout the core system and many extensions is understandable for a product nobody expected to be used outside of North America, but given that if working from the ground up it’s not too difficult to build something that can use flexible date formats (particularly on spreadsheet platforms that natively use numerical date fields that aren’t explicitly formatted) it’s pretty disappointing. I’m glad (for them) that some people can tolerate clunky workarounds for the sake of accessing the other functionality, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of other potential international customers are put off from using Tiller because of the formatting problem. It’s a shame, as it looks great and I was looking forward to exploring what folk have been doing with it. The disappointment reminds me of when I encounter things that assume I wan’t to use feet and inches, or non-ISO paper formats, or insist on giving temperatures in Fahrenheit.
Somewhat ironically I do have the coding/Google Sheets skills to ‘fix’ many of the problems, at least cosmetically, but I came to Tiller looking for an easy-to-tweak set of modular templates and I don’t have the time or energy to go re-engineering a product that’s not really been built for an international market. I read somewhere that it’s OK to keep copies of downloaded templates for personal use as a non-customer, so I’ll hold on to some of them to possibly play with in future if I have any free time–but I can’t justify a paid subscription when I’m going to have to do all the legwork myself to fix a (contextually) broken system. And suggesting that I just shrug off the issue and put up with the US-style dates doesn’t fix my problem, because I can’t.
If at all possible, I’d request that Tiller make it much clearer in their online presence/marketing that the dates system is currently internationally incompatible, as I feel it was mis-sold to me through omission of this information. I’m still in my trial period, so I’ll need to make sure I cancel the account as soon as possible as I don’t want to get stuck having paid for something that for me (as it stands) is entirely unusable. (Because, haha, I’m one of those people who double-up their autism with ADHD, so have fallen victim to the ‘sign up for free trial but give us your credit card details first’ pitfall many times in the past. I nearly balked from creating a Tiller account because of that, as it always feels like a scam designed to prey on the congenitally disorganised, but I broke my own rule. I wish I hadn’t.)
I guess I just didn’t do enough research before signing up, so more fool me. This is very tiring–and just one instance of the much broader problem of US-centric virtual systems generally, when they pop up in English language searches or sources. I entirely understand that US companies and communities have no obligation to the rest of us–it’s just frustrating when we get their products pushed in our online direction without clarity as to their geographical or cultural exclusivity.
Hope this hasn’t come across as a rant. I’m honestly not angry; just rather sad to miss out on using what looks on the surface to be quite a good set of tools. If you’ve succeeded in reading this far, you surely deserve a small reward–or something more interesting to do–so I’m very much hoping you find it.
Look after yourselves folks. This is totally about the Thing, not the People. I certainly don’t want to go around adding fuel to the fires of ire by bashing Americans, especially when they’re so deeply in the midst of calamitously bashing each other. Peace and love to all. I do hope things improve.
[ahhh… ETA-- oh… no… I said ‘autistic’ in a thread about US/everywhere-else disconnect. I. Am. So. Sorry. No, really.]
