Show HN: New time and daylight application | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: New time and daylight application

chronozone.xyz

150 pointsdassreis34 comments

It's great. The 12, 24, and light clock visualization is particularly good.

In terms of feedback, only one thing: The first thing I tried didn't work. This was dragging the map so I could explore the effect of latitude on day length in both hemispheres. It appears to only support the case where the crosshairs are near an actual city (which is not possible deep down in the southern hemisphere).

This might benefit from the code at https://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4597134, which uses lat/long directly.

I like that. Big fan of D3

Just finished this little application that shows the current time in any zone and a sort of animated daylight clock that adjusts according to map coordinates. Value any feedback and a few social shares if it's any good. Thanks for looking.

This is absolutely brilliant! One thing what I would love to see, next to the timezone info is the actual timezone in UTC+2, etc. format. That way you could for example immediately see why does Portugal and Spain have a one difference in sunsets the western parts, for example.

I can't see the blue shades in the daylight clock with µblock running (in Chromium on Linux), so at first I didn't understand what the purpose of the website is, but it looks great in an incognito window — and thus without µblock — in the same browser.

Hi. Thanks. Don't know how to address that. Must be something to do with the XHR for the timezone info.

Did you change anything? It works now, outside of incognito mode, with µblock running.

That's good. No, nothing changed

I hate when software gets creative…

A mouseover quick summary of the differences between the times would be really useful.

took me awhile to understand it. maybe make the crosshair a little more visible.

The clock took me a while to understand, but then I realized it's much more intuitive than I assumed and I was reading too much into it.

Here's what's going on:

- At the center of the map is the crosshairs. Whereever this crosshair is, all other information will be a function of this location.

- The inner analog clock shows timezone-legal official time at the crosshairs on a traditional, 12-hour clock dial.

- The outer dial shows a 24-hour day's hours. The magenta dot indicates that location's current solar time, and therefore, its progression through the day.

- The colorbands immediately inside the outer dial show each phase of the day at that location, keyed by the outer dial. The legend for each color is on the right.

Honestly, the impedance mismatch between the inner 12-hour dial and the outer 24-hour dial confused me at first.

>Honestly, the impedance mismatch between the inner 12-hour dial and the outer 24-hour dial confused me at first.

Likewise. It took me a second to realize that while the hour hand on the clock appears to be pointing at the "Astronomical twilight" shaded portion of the ring for my location, those two elements are completely unrelated.

> It took me a second to realize that while the hour hand on the clock appears to be pointing at the "Astronomical twilight" shaded portion of the ring for my location, those two elements are completely unrelated.

This matches my experience precisely.

>The outer dial shows a 24-hour day's hours. The magenta dot indicates that location's current solar time, and therefore, its progression through the day.

On the outer dial, the magenta dot also shows the official time in that timezone (or rather UTC with local timezone offset). Compare for example London and Paris, which are in nearly the same longitude but different timezones.

On the color dial the magenta dot is indeed showing solar time.

I really, really like the clock visualization. Makes me wish for a desktop utility with just the clock.

This is great. You know what would really take it to the next level? Tides! It would be awesome if micro-adjustments along the coast showed the times of low and high tides. My parents, who live along the coast, would use it multiple times/day. Most tide applications are a little too complex for their needs.

This is very nice. The only thing I'd like better is if it changed on the fly as you scrolled around (rather than you needing to have the screen stationary).

This would be a big improvement, making it much easier to explore the map.

I like it! Two feature requests: deep linking to specific cities/coordinates/whatever, and geolocating me so I don't have to use the search bar first thing.

Very nice. As somebody else mentioned, the length of the day would be nice (it could be a third column of times).

The time zone borders map is a bit low resolution so in some places it gets it wrong (for example the northern sides of Roche Harbor, WA and Eastport, MA). Also seems to be a few years out of date (doesn't show America/Santa Isabel). But I expect these are outside your control.

Sometimes it's nice to know the expected daylight in a place that you might visit later in the year, so a way to choose the day of the year would be useful. Perhaps a year-long slider across the bottom of the page that points to a date (defaulting to today)?

Nice app, good work OP! I currently use http://suncalc.net for stuff like this, something I really value that Chronozone doesn't seem to have yet is the ability to select different times of the year, as well as seeing the movement of the sun during the day.

Was recently reading about the photography "Golden hour"[0], and this is very relevant. Bookmarked - thanks!

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hour_(photography)

Love this, good work. Some suggestions (these are my own little quirks):

- (desktop) Zooming is on the cursor, rather than on the crosses at the center. Don't know if that's a maps thing or not. Kind of annoying to position location on the center, then zooming to where ever the cursor happened to be.

- would love it if it showed the duration of the day (HH:MM:SS) (in addition to the time of day for sunrise and sunset), and also the duration between {astronomical, nautical, civil} dawn and dusk.

All that being said, this is a really good app.

This isn't actually accurate with regard to China Standard Time... All of China is one timezone, despite spanning 5 of them.

This is great. It's be good if the lat/lon was updated in the URL so you could bookmark your own city.

Wow, great way of visualising this. I recently moved from Istanbul to Stockholm so this kind of stuff has been on my mind quite a lot. What I’d also love is the ability to see how the daylight clock for different times of year - would love to see Stockholms graphic for midsummer or winter, for example.

Pretty ui, I'd like to see a physical alarm clock like this.

Interesting that in this 24h clock face 0 is at the bottom, instead of what I think is more conventional top. Of course it is pretty arbitrary either way.

I like this a lot. For some reason it doesn’t quite work in Safari on Mac as the fields don’t get populated, but in Chrome it worked very well.

Doesn't seem to handle DST. Otherwise, great thing! Makes me want to use it everyday!

Very enjoyable little app, OP! Useful too.

Are you supposed to see anything? I only see a crosshair overlaid on Google Maps.

Firefox 47.0.1 on W7 x64

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