World Meeting Planner

Have you ever needed planning an international conference call and had a hard time finding the best time for all participants? The World Meeting Planner is a tool for professionals who need to schedule conference calls across time zones and individuals who want to connect with their family members and friends abroad.

World Meeting Planner allows you to enter names of cities that will participate in your call or video conference. You can pick from a list of more than 40,000 cities. Once you have your locations selected, you will be able to dial times and dates and interactively see what day and time it represents in the other locations. Daylight savings times are accounted for, so you will see the right information for your scheduled date.

Lite version, with basic functionality, supported by ads is also available in selected countries.

Basic operations

Main function of this application is to find meeting time that works comfortably for participants from multiple time zones. To achieve that, follow first three tabs at the bottom of the app from left to right.

1. Locations. Select locations that will participate in the meeting.
2. Time. Select date and time suitable for all participants. The view displays local time for the given date for selected locations and a daylight indicator.
3. Calendar (full version only). On this tab you can schedule the meeting in your calendar or invite participants via email
1. Tap on Schedule in calendar to bring up standard iOS calendar page. Select participants (if the calendar supports it), recurrence etc.
2. Tap on Invite by email to compose invitation email. You will be prompted to enter basic information about the meeting. Clicking the action button on the top right will bring standard email interface with prepopulated meeting information and with ICS attachment that includes meeting info that your recipients can double click to add the meeting to their calendars

Creating favorites (full version only)
Favorites are a way to store frequently used meeting participants or locations for future use. Favorites can be created in two ways:

1. You can create favorite using the “+” button on the Favorites tab. You need to provide at least favorite name and time zone. Other details are optional, but can be used to further simplify the use of the application if you know them:  
1. Email address will be added as recipient’s email if you send invitations by email.
2. Geographic coordinates will be used for the daylight indicator in the Time tab
2. Favorites can be also created from an existing item in the Locations tab. Create a new location in the Locations tab. Once added to the list, you can tap on it to bring up location detail view, which contains map and geographic details. In the top right corner hit the Save button – this will bring up the same view as (1) with prepopulated name, coordinates and time zone information. You can edit any field, for example, you may want to change the name of the location from “Bracknell, UK” to “Dev Center Europe” or “Peter’s Office”

Using favorites (full version only)
Go to the Favorites tab and tap on the name of the favorite you want to add to locations list for your current meeting.

Settings

The application settings are not modified from the app, but are accessible via system Settings utility on your device. Tap on the Settings icon. Scroll down and open WorldPlanner (or WPLite if you are using the lite version). You should see four items now.

• Organizer’s name (full version only). Organizer’s name is the name that is included in invitation emails. If you leave this item empty, the application will use your email address instead.
• Organizer’s email (full version only). Organizer’s email that will be displayed in invitation email. If you leave this item empty, you will need to enter it every time you send an invitation.
• City names in ASCII. This setting determines whether city (location) names will be displayed with accented characters or in plain ASCII. If you turn this option off, you will need to use accented characters in the search (Prelouc vs. Přelouč). Please note that if you turn ASCII names off and use English keyboard, you won’t be able to type and therefore find locations that use accented characters in their names, for example İstanbul’s first letter is “İ” and not “I”.
• Advanced search. This option controls behavior of the search feature in Locations. If advanced search is turned on and you type several letters from the location name, the search feature will display all locations in the database that include these characters. For example, if you type “yor”, it will display cities like York and New York. If the advanced search is turned off, only locations that start with “yor” will be displayed, ie. York, but not New York. Advanced search has been added to take advantage of performance of the new iPhone4. If you use older devices, like iPhone 3G, leaving this option off will give better performance.

Location search

Location search allows access to database of more than 40,000 world cities. Type at least first two characters from the name and the search view displays list of cities that match your request. If you don’t see the city you want, type more characters. By default, the search is using ASCII representation of city names (no accented or special characters) and displays cities that start with the characters you type. There are some settings available that may help you make your searches more effective:

• Non-ASCII search. Uses all alphabetical characters, but requires that you use appropriate international keyboard
• Advanced search. As opposed to the default search, that displays results that start with characters you type, the advanced search shows result for cities that contain characters you type anywhere in the name

In order to change the settings, cancel out of the search view and switch to the Settings application. Steps for changing the settings are described in Basic operations.

If your city isn’t there

• If your search setting is set to non-ASCII, make sure you enter all characters with appropriate accented characters. Conversely, if it is set to ASCII, make sure you don’t use accented characters in your search
• Try alternative name. For example Muenchen instead of Munich, Bengaluru instead of Bangalore etc.
• Try switching the app to advanced search mode
• Check for updates
• Report the problem. Reporting the problem may help other users and if the problem was reported before and there is no fix yet, there may be a workaround found by other users
• If you can’t find the city, create your own favorite. It is easy, but you will need to know your location’s time zone (full version only)
• If you can find the city under alternate name and you don’t like the alternate name, create your own favorite from existing location

Location detail view

Location detail view provides a map view of selected location and additional geographic information. This view has two purposes:

• Allows verification of otherwise ambiguous location
• Allows adding the location to favorites, including name, geographic coordinates and time zone data (full version only)

Working with favorites (full version only)

Favorites allow saving frequently used locations for future use.  Refer to the Creating favorites under Basic operations for instructions how to add new favorite

Benefits

Besides the obvious benefit of having frequently used data stored for future use, Favorites can be used to create locations that are missing in the current database or storing existing locations under alternate names. If you save favorite with email address, it will be added to recipients of the invitation email. In current version of the application and version of iOS available at the time of development, the email can’t be added to participants if calendar

Scheduling and invitations (full version only)

Some iOS device calendars connected to external servers allow adding participants and inviting them directly from the calendar and some don’t. For example, calendars connected to Exchange and Hotmail connected via ActiveSync support invitations. As of iOS version 4.2, the default device calendar does not allow that and at the time of this writing, Google calendar used from the device does not support it either.
If your calendar does not allow adding participants and creating invitations, you can create invitation email in the Calendar tab by tapping on the Invite by email button. You will create an editable email message with prepopulated event information and an ICS attachment. If the recipient opens the file in their email program or on their iOS device with iOS 4.2 or newer, the ICS file will create the event in their calendar. ICS files are supported by many email programs, including Outlook, Google, Hotmail, iCalendar and others.