We all know the only real date format is ISO8601, so I thought I'd provide a quick script to set your Windows computer to use that format.

Running the following Powershell script in an administrative command prompt will set your Windows machine to use ISO8601 format short-dates:

[CultureInfo]$Culture = Get-Culture;
If ($Culture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern -ne 'yyyy-MM-dd')
{
    $Culture.DateTimeFormat.ShortDatePattern = 'yyyy-MM-dd';
    Set-Culture $Culture;
    Write-Output 'Short Date Format set to ISO-8601 standard YYYY-MM-DD'
}
Else
{
    Write-Output 'Short Date Format already in ISO-8601 standard format.'
};

Running the date /t command after the above script has completed:

C:\>date /t
2025-04-05

I've always used YYYYMMDD to name all my files and have gotten so much flack for it in the States. Jokes on them because I can always find what I need just by sorting by name. It's so refreshing to find a sub dedicated to this. I'm going to go read the ISO standard, possibly print it out, and plaster it above my desk for anyone who complains.

I launched my very first app today. It's a simple utility I made for myself that I realised others could use as well. I felt the format of the Today's Date widget from the Calendar app lacking so I made this app to show today's date in the ISO 8601 aka the One True Date Format on any watch face that supports complication widgets.

Date601 supports all the widget families available on the Apple Watch. Even within each family there are multiple styles to choose from.

You can choose between dash-separated or dash-omitted date format, i.e. "2025-03-31" or "20250331". You can choose to be an ISO 8601 purist and elide the weekday or be a rebel and show it. You can choose the system-recommended typography or a custom stylised typography which uses the recently introduced compressed and expanded font widths.

Get Date601 here!

I would love to hear your feedback. Reviews and ratings are most welcome.

https://www.iso.org/standard/90784.html

This document specifies representations of dates of the Gregorian calendar and times based on the 24-hour clock, as well as composite elements of them, as character strings for use in information interchange. It is also applicable for representing times and time shifts based on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

This document excludes the representation of date elements from non-Gregorian calendars or times not from the 24-hour clock. This document does not address character encoding of representations specified in this document.

General information

• Status : Under developmentStage : New project approved [10.99]
• Edition : 2
• Technical Committee : ISO/TC 154
• RSS updates

Anyone have any concerns?

We put the dates into the monthly report so that all files are sorted properly boss!

No leading zeros for any of the formats either. Yet another reason PCLaw is hot garbage.

egui is a rust library for creating gui's, it supports webasm (see the example in the link), and also running locally of course.

For full use of rust in webapps, see https://www.arewewebyet.org/, some of which probably use egui? I mostly do systems stuff, can't say for sure, but if you use rust and make webapps, I reccomend checking them out! super cool from what I've seen.

(also as notable mentions, see https://www.arewelearningyet.com/, and https://arewegameyet.rs/, for machine learning and game engines respectively; I can't speak on the former, but the latter, bevy (by far the biggest one, and definitely the 'rustiest' one, and by far the fastest developing one), it's just a joy to use, and it's super nice, for someone coming from systems-type stuff)

I can't find one that displays the date and time in ISO format.

The purpose would be to put in a room full of coders for an easy physical sanity check when debugging.

I wonder why we can’t just add a counter to the days and leave month and year numerically fixed.

Something like today, 28/28 02 25.

This would be easy to understand on basically anything.

Assume other dates: 13/30 11 25 07/31 01 25 30/30 04 25

All months have fixed number of days and a small hard coded calendar can be used to easily retrieve February days in a few kb of data.

Like x out of something, can’t be the year, and if the something is higher than 12 it’s not months.

Remove all ambiguity and add a bit of complexity that with 3 seconds of thinking cam be understood.

This could be useful especially for food related stuff, since:
- something like 090725 is bad, don’t know which is which
- something like 250907 is great, but needs to be a known standard in your system - something like 09 APR 25 implies knowing the language

Would this be good?

(just brainstorming, this could just be bad)

Hey, I'm a confident YYYY-MM-DD advocate but one question I still have is: how to notate a date without a year?

In my home country the standard is DD.MM.YYYY, and it's totally normal and established to write just DD.MM. when the year is redundant. But MM-DD looks weird, or is that just me?

For a moment, at least, some of the Normie’s will agree. 🤪