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Comment by nicksardo | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug:

I created https://chronograph.io back in 2014 so people can share accurate, live stopwatches and timers. Other sites "share" by putting the start epoch & duration in a url querystring; Chronograph is one of the first to actually share a session with concurrent edits.

Of the years, it's found a variety of use cases:

- Online scrum meetings.

- Recording starts & stops of races when they're geographically separated.

- Coordination of breaks between language interpreters.

- Syncing of podcast recording with multiple guests.

- Video game twitchers to broadcast when they'll play

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Tiny amount of UI feedback; I automatically wanted to click “cloud-synchronized” at the top to find out how it works technically, since the text is blue and I’d expect it to be a link.

May be better to just italicize or bold that rather than change the color. Or better yet, actually make it a link to a short “how does it work” page

I'll do that, thanks. I've never had feedback that's indicated people wanted to know.

It uses NTP's clock synchronization algorithm to get the servers' time. This is done over a websocket as it's twice as fast as a typical ajax request/response. Then all changes are made using the browser's idea of server time.

At the bottom of the page, you can see your computer/phone's time offset and precision.

Heh. This is the second time I've posted this in less than 24 hours, but it's relevant. I won't even apologize for the plug as it's not something I particularly care about.

In case you want to go old school, I made a clock. It's a PWA so you can use it as a widget or app. It's open source - just click "View Source". (Actually, I may have ripped off most of the code, I can't remember, so don't do that.)

Why? I like analog clocks to keep track of time. To me they're like moving pie charts. So I made this for myself and will bring it up on a second screen or an HDTV if I need it. You'd be surprised how useful it can be.

https://qidget.com/clock/

It is beautiful!

That's a great service. I can think of various features to support more use cases:

* provide an optional label - for the use case where several clocks are used and shared.

* start and share several stop watches from a single page: start them one by one or together. For a race with multiple participants that either start sequentially or together.

* Support taking split times.

* Combine timer and stopwatch: count down from a set time, then start the stopwatch at zero. It currently does this already. This supports races like sailing where the actual start is preceded by a countdown period.

Thanks for the feedback!

1) Click on the stopwatch timer title; you can edit it in place. Indeed, discovery of this is not great. My UX designs tends to be quite minimal. I'll try to make this more obvious.

2) I'm considering building use-case specific sites with the same backend to more adequately support each. I despise how many generic sites overload UI with junk aimed at certain power users for a use-case I don't have.

3) Splits are already supported for stopwatches.

4) This touches an occasionally requested feature of making sequential "entities" - most often in the context of circuit training. 5 minutes of bench pressing followed by 5 minutes of jumping jacks, etc. Allowing the addition of a stopwatch at the end of the sequence makes sense. Thanks

Just wondering, how do you keep the timer accurate?

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