Patent ID: 7562313

Claim:
An article of manufacture comprising a computer memory system containing program instructions for entering temporal information to an application according to the method of: displaying a timescale selection window in an application user interface, wherein the window concurrently includes a coarse granularity selection zone displaying a coarse timescale in coarse granularity increments, an intermediate granularity selection zone displaying an intermediate timescale in intermediate granularity increments that are subsets of respective coarse granularity increments, and a fine granularity selection zone displaying a fine timescale in fine granularity increments that are subsets of respective intermediate granularity increments, and wherein each zone covers a common span of time and is located in a discrete region of the timescale selection window; responsive to a first user selection command entered via the coarse granularity selection zone, changing a time period displayed in the intermediate selection zone; responsive to a second user selection command entered via the intermediate granularity selection zone, changing a time period displayed in the fine granularity selection zone; and, responsive to positioning a cursor over a first granular element corresponding to a start point, clicking a command button, dragging the cursor to a second granular element corresponding to an end point, and releasing the command button, passing temporal information represented by the start point and the end point to the application, wherein the positioning of the cursor over the first or second granularity element can be done in either the intermediate granularity selection zone or the fine granularity selection zone.