Desktop: Use system settings for date formatting

[hl2guide]

I live in Australia and have Windows 10 set to the Australian language pack installed and active.
The timestamps for notes in Standard Notes appear as "16:30" instead of the expected (localized) time of "4:30PM".

Does Standard Notes fully support 12 hour time formats?

[mobitar]

We do use locale settings for dates: https://github.com/standardfile/sfjs/blob/master/lib/app/models/item.js#L435

Perhaps try running this snippet in your browser developer console and see what result you get. You can also open the JS inspector in the desktop app using Help > Toggle Error Console.

[hl2guide]

I tried running that snippet within a browser and within Standard Notes Error Console.

Both resulted in:
SyntaxError: export declarations may only appear at top level of a module debugger eval code:3
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token export

I also saw: C:\Users\Dean\AppData\Local\Programs\standard-notes\resourcesapp.asar\dist\javascripts\render\spellcheck.js:71 Using OS-level spell check API with locale en_GB

[mobitar]

Well, not sure what snippet you ran directly, but you'd have to modify it a bit to work without context:

var locale = (navigator.languages && navigator.languages.length) ? navigator.languages[0] : navigator.language;
let dateFormatter = new Intl.DateTimeFormat(locale, {
  year: 'numeric',
  month: 'short',
  day: '2-digit',
  weekday: 'long',
  hour: '2-digit',
  minute: '2-digit',
});
console.log(dateFormatter.format(new Date()));

[hl2guide]

ah ok, my bad. That snippet resulted in the below.

Standard Notes:

Thursday, 18 Apr 2019, 00:25
undefined

Firefox:

Thursday, 18 Apr 2019, 12:24 am debugger eval code:10:1
undefined

[mobitar]

Hmm..do you have Chrome installed? Curious to see what it would report. The desktop app is based on Electron is based on Chromium, so that would get us the highest correlation.

[hl2guide]

I ran it in Opera (uses Chromium/Blink engine to my knowledge):
Thursday, 18 Apr 2019, 00:34
undefined

[mobitar]

So yeah, something with that browser engine is yielding 24 hour time. Not quite sure what this is. My hunch is that there's a system preference somewhere that controls this.

[hl2guide]

Maybe Standard Notes could have a "use 12 hour time format" boolean flag that acts as an override?

[mobitar]

Yeah, maybe. We generally don't have a preferences pane yet to place things like these. But if and when we do, this option would definitely make a good candidate.

[leafcutterant]

I'd add my experience with this: I use a US locale, but changed the system settings to display a 24-hour format. Standard Notes still goes with AM/PM, so I suspect it pulls the system locale and decides based on that, not on the system preference. It would be better if it could follow the preference.