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baryon

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 3, 2009
3,906
2,979
This is going to be a "First World Problem" but I wonder if others are seeing this too, and if I'm just missing something.

I live in Hungary so I have set my region to "Hungary" accordingly, but I like my dates and times to be displayed like they are in the US and UK, I find it cleaner and easier to read. It's also what computers and websites tend to display, so I'm used to it.

In El Capitan and before, the date at the top right was displayed like this (the US way) even if I used Hungary as a region:

Screen Shot 2016-09-21 at 17.08.36.png


While in Sierra it displays like this (the Hungarian way) regardless of how I customize the date formats in Language & Region > Advanced:

Screen Shot 2016-09-22 at 14.40.34.png


I just don't like the period and comma and the order is reversed, and I prefer the US way.

Also, in Calendar, the date format is mixed between Hungarian and US format, with the US format being displayed on a single click, while the Hungarian format appears when editing the date of the same event:

Screen Shot 2016-09-22 at 14.46.03.png (US format: day, month, year)
Screen Shot 2016-09-22 at 14.46.10.png (Hungarian format: year, month, day)
Confusing and inconsistent as hell especially within the same exact App.

Notification center, again, the period and comma, with the day of the week at the end (Hungarian way):

Screen Shot 2016-09-22 at 14.50.58.png

Now you'd think I could change this in System Preferences but this is how I've set it up:

Screen Shot 2016-09-22 at 14.42.12.png

Screen Shot 2016-09-21 at 17.07.45.png

While my region is Hungary, I have customized it to be "day of the week/day/month/year". I didn't have to do this in El Capitan because it defaulted to this anyway.

If I change my region to the UK, then everything is consistent and displays according to the UK date format, which is good. However, this has consequences, namely in Maps, distances appear in Miles, while I need them to appear in Km. Changing the distance units in Language & Region is ignored, again, and Maps only looks at the Region I have and assumes that the UK uses Miles, even if I specifically customized it to use the Metric system:

Screen Shot 2016-09-22 at 15.03.34.png

So Sierra mostly simply ignores the Advanced Language & Region formats around the OS, and instead just assumes the defaults for whatever Region I chose for most things, while assuming the US format in Calendar for other things. It's just a huge mess.

El Capitan ignored these too, but at least it did so consistently — if I chose "Hungary" as my region, all dates would still appear as US format regardless of my customization. I know that's wrong too, but it suited me perfectly and I got used to it.

No big deal, I can deal with using UK as a region and just not using Maps. But come on Apple, this is stupid!

Is this just buggy as hell, or is there something somewhere I can change to get this to work the way I want?

Thanks.




Edit 1: I figured that Ireland uses the usual English date format, but also uses the Metric system — the perfect combination! Changing my region to Ireland fixed everything so far! I'm still interested in a more "official" solution but this is a nice workaround until something unexpected gets messed up because of it.

Edit 2: Well guess what! Now in Maps, you can choose if you want Miles or Km. Wow. I'm impressed. Anyway, this doesn't solve the Date issue, but it sure helps. I can us the UK format and still use the Metric system in maps.

Screen Shot 2016-09-22 at 15.55.19.png

I guess I kind of solved my problem here but I'll leave this up in case some future lost souls have the same issue one day.
 
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