title: DateUtils.getRelativeTimeSpanString for future dates
body: <p>So [DateUtils.getRelativeTimeSpanString()][1] in the Android SDK works great for showing relative times that are in the past.  </p>
  
  <p>i.e:  5 days ago, or 5 minutes ago.</p>
  
  <p>But doesn't seem to work so well for dates that are in the future.  It seems to just print the date.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any easy alternatives for generating relative time span strings for dates that are in the future (short of writing something that figures out the days, hours, minutes, seconds by comparing two calendar objects)? </p>
  
  <p>Something a long the lines of:  in 5 days, or in 5 minutes?</p>
  
  <p>Here is basically what I would have to make, and it just looks kind of dirty (note: this code was written just for the post and not actually run through a java compiler):</p>
  
  <pre><code>Calendar calendarIO = Calendar.getInstance();
  calendarIO.set(2013, 2, 14, 7, 0);
  
  long milliseconds1 = calendarIO.getTimeInMillis();
  long milliseconds2 = System.currentTimeMillis();
  long diff = milliseconds1 - milliseconds2;
  long diffSeconds = diff / 1000;
  long diffMinutes = diff / (60 * 1000);
  long diffHours = diff / (60 * 60 * 1000);
  long diffDays = diff / (24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);   
  
  String relativeTime = "";
  if (diffDays &gt; 1) {
      relativeTime = diffDays + " days";
  } else if (diffDays &gt; 0) {
      relativeTime = diffDays + " days " + diffHours + " hours";
  } else if (diffHours &gt; 1) {
      relativeTime = diffHours + " hours";
  } else if (diffMinutes &gt; 0) {
      relativeTime = diffMinutes + " minutes.";
  }
  </code></pre>