Time Zones | Hacker News Reader

Time Zones

everytimezone.com

386 pointsdominis95 comments

This looks great, and I love the slider. Maybe I'm just not seeing the option, but I need to be able to add and remove time zones. A lot of the confusion of these tools is having to ignore the many cities that don't concern you.

Saying the weekday on each would be great too (ex: Friday, March 21). When you're working with Australia it can be hard to remember that they're almost a full day ahead.

you can click on that gear icon in the top right to add/remove cities. The list of available ones is quite limited tough, and it’s very US-Centric

on second inspection, that “gear icon” only appears when looking at it on the iPad.

I see it on my iPhone as well.

Thomas added this to the mobile version of the app first (last week). It'll be on the "full" version soon.

http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ offers exactly this. It allows you to search for cities/timezones, shows weekdays, native time format (am/pm or 24hour depending on the timezone) and you can easily select a specific date for the comparison

+1 to worldtimebuddy.com

I use it almost daily.

+1 here as well. Great UI and easily schedule meetings. Even option to paste the details into a meeting invite.

Totally agree with you. You can customize the displayed cities on the iPhone/iPad version, and that'll be on the "desktop" version RSN.

This doesn't solve my main gripe with most time converters. I normally don't want the time in Vienna, I want the time at UST-6. My common use case is that I find out an event will start streaming at, say, 10 PM UST-6 and all I know is my clock is EST-3. If I don't know what country uses UST-6, this converter is next to useless for me. My problem is with multiple standards, not with visualization.

I don't know who thought of the whole EST, UST and other nonsense, anyways. Why not just use GMT? At least you can easily convert that.

I prefer using UTC, myself. I think it's the way of the future. Timezones have long since been obsolete with the advent of a globalized world, not to mention that they are an unholy mess. UTC is universal.

So while we aren't going to switch to UTC for a while, I would very much thank you if you'd use UTC on websites and other internet related services. It simplifies things for everyone and will drive adoption forward.

Oh, it's not about _our_ preferences, it's about figuring out what time other people are talking about when there's an event happening with a live stream, and the stream says "We're back tomorrow at 9am CET." Never mind that if you've got a live video stream with that info it'd be more helpful to everybody if you include a countdown of some kind.

For yet another timezone tool, here's the time at 10pm UTC-6 in your local time: http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/?t=10pm&tz=GMT-6

Am I going out of my mind, or is this not a year old already?

I'm sure there was an article on the front page where they talked about the build and stuff like local storage on iPad. (it started life as an iPad web app).

I'm aware that "dupes" are bound to occur, but this was big news last time around and I'm surprised no one remembers it.

Yes I remember seeing this on the internets in October, so it could have been even before that.

Absolutely. I remember adding this to my home screen at least 6 months back, with a 'green-blue clock' apple touch icon on my iPad.

It's lightweight, suggesting minimum use of drop-shadows and css3 effects but that's pretty much about it. From usability perspective, I still find standard 2 arm analog clock designs more useful.

Article from April 2010: http://ajaxian.com/archives/every-time-zone-why-the-web-rock...

Yes, I remember this when it hit Ajaxian. It's worth noting that the code was done by Thomas Fuchs, the man behind scriptaculous. A true pioneer in Javascript programming.

Here's a previous discussion, though it was from almost two years ago, so I could see how many people wouldn't remember (or weren't here two years ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1264554

Well, it's nice but...

It shows completely random cities I don't care about. As a bonus it doesn't mention what timezone they are in. Also, I'm pretty sure my locale doesn't use 12h format.

"Best" is a bit of stretch, and link-baiting: let us be judge of that.

Anyway, I don't mind the "Freckle" ad at the end, but please don't hijack my clicks. If I want to open it in a new tab, don't use a js on_click, and put a simple link to the website.

I'm the developer of the site. Just a quick note, on iPad/iPhone and Android you have the option to customize the list of time zones shown; and we'll add more time zones in the future (and probably some sort of city search and custom labels). There will also be some sort of calendar to select a date in the future, so you can link to specific date with the correct timezone offsets for that date set (because those change with DST).

Can you add Seoul, Korea? I will use your site all the time then!

Sorry, this is way too confusing. What I like is a simple tool like http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/

http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ is another visually appealing option.

WorldTimeBuddy helps me in scheduling my meetings for people across time zones.

This tool (everytimezone) does not allow go beyond tomorrow.

I also like world time buddy more than this one. It allows you to customize which time zones you see. As mentioned, it is great for scheduling future meetings. It is also helpful for not having to worry about daylight savings time differences between countries/states. It is also nice that it lets you export to many formats (clipboard, Google calendar, etc).

I wish there was an option to switch to timezone names (EST, CST, etc) instead of just cities but still this is great as timezones anyways throw me off

Or just have the relevant code next to a city that corresponds.

I travel a lot on business and have been using this tool for a while.

The main consumer problem it solves for me is the "I'm in Barcelona on Tuesday and need a conference call between Atlanta and Ukraine. What is a time that's workable for everyone"

It's indispensable for that problem for me. Filtering TZ and adding TZ would be a nice additional feature though.

So how do you find the cities unlisted?

Usually just mentally add the +1/-1 in my head where needed

It's a pain but, it's better than doing all the math

Have a look at http://worldtimebuddy.com/ - i am using it for exactly your use-case. It is really convenient to only display some specific time zones and search for a specific timezone, country or city.

Ok... this may actually be better

Really digging it so far

It seems really finicky, at least on Firefox (it keeps jumping back to the current time). You also can't add or remove cities/time zones, so overall it seems pretty useless.

Yeah, the jumpy thing really makes it kind of painful to use, even though I love the interface otherwise.

That's a bug the site has with Firefox, which we haven't gotten around to fix yet. It does work properly in Chrome/Safari/IE, tho.

Nice, but I find Wolfram Alpha faster and easier to use:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=12%3A30pm+PT

I would agree if there was an option for the 24 hours format.

In fact, if it was the best timezone converter ever, it would know my country uses 24 hour format and automatically select it. The server would be able to know my country by my ip so this would just be another attribute in the json ajax call.

Google also works well.

http://www.google.com/search?ix=sea&sourceid=chrome&...

Well, almost. Could do with a city lookup that highlights the timezone bar that corresponds to your chosen city and labels it with that city. I think that's the missing step in usability.

Agree. My first thought looking at this website was, "This is awesome! Now how do I add the cities/countries I'm usually calling?" I tried to find a way but it doesn't look like that's supported yet. I'm probably pretty representative of most other people's knowledge of what cities are in which time zones, so it would be a good feature to add to filter by specific city.

I also think it's too confusing. I prefer http://time.is over it.

I guess preference is, well, a matter of preference, but confusion and clutter is usually not debatable, and the way I see it, everytimezone does beat time.is in that regard. Time.is is a whole lot of text with no real reference to what's ahead of you and behind you in "timezones".

Why does every HN story get reposted every 6 months or so?

Uh, that's awesome. Actually really well laid out and visually appealing, and understandable.

EDIT: ooh actually, could do with an option to remove/add the sliding time selection. I'm finding it hard to revert to my current local time once I've moved the selection.

Not such a good idea to stack the selected times onto your web history either.. makes going back a pain.

I built an iPhone as a weekend project a year or so ago. http://www.timesliderapp.com (free). In a similar vein to this one... the few people who've downloaded it seem to like it :)

Works & looks nicely on the iPhone but the thing that bugged me is that each time you slide the bar, you get another hash in the url - ending up in me clicking the back button about 15 times to finally get back to HN.

For a few things in life, I confess to liking the old-fashioned ways. For time zones, I like this iOS app:

http://www.emeraldsequoia.com/h/Terra/Terra.html

It doesn't look like it handles the switch to Daylights savings time. See http://everytimezone.com/#2012-3-11,-300,6be

Such a brilliant way to market your product, LetsFreckle. Better than any adwords or facebook ads campaign I'm sure. Hope you're tracking conversions from this.

Content marketing at its finest. Great job.

I actually find that usability wise, this is a bit difficult. I far prefer http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/

This is neat. It reminds me a bit of part of my Conky setup. It looks like this: https://imgur.com/zi1Ub. It's not as accurate, but it gives me an idea of what time of day it is everywhere.

I have a cron script that runs every hour that pulls in sat images of cloud cover, the earth, and then the daylight lines and composites them together with imagemagick. I got the script from a lifehacker article where they used it for wallpaper.

> I have a cron script

Neat. Any chance of you putting it up somewhere?

It is nice but you would like to have the possibility to choose your own towns. Often for example I want to know what time it is in Seattle compared to the time in Frankfurt where I live. If it can be customized, it will be a great tool.

For the moment I prefer www.time.is which takes a different approach but what I want.

Well-done interface and great promo for their core product, which I am going to take a deeper look at, because maybe we can use it. Back to the converter: what I need to convert most often is between UTC and local time. Suggest also making displayed timezones configurable, several other minor nits...

This is a great repurposed version of the Hipmunk interface, Surprised no one else has made the connection! FlickMunk won the techcrunch disrupt (hipmunk for movies) - I wonder how many other applications for this interface style will pop up, it's pretty versatile.

I'm using timeanddate.com since long time, and plan to continue to do so:) Love their multi-zone meeting planner. Also lots of useful details, such as when the next daylight savings shift is going to happen in a particular location.

Please include other BRIC countries that were kept out of list: Russia and China.

FYI, you can also type "What time is it in CityName" into Google.

My problem with Google (and this site) is sometimes I don't know a city and am only given a timezone (e.g. on the phone someone says "Call me back before 7:30 Pacific").

I've been planning on making this exact thing myself. This one looks even better than what I was thinking though. The only thing it's missing is the ability to choose which timezones you want to see.

Fantastic! Been looking for something like this.

Could you also put the timezone (both GMT and other name) besides the city name? (as subscript & subscript, one over the orther) [ex: San Francisco (PDT/GMT-x)]

Shell solution:

    TZ=*some_timezone* date

Say, for Sydney, Australia:

    $ TZ=Australia/Sydney date
    Thu Mar 22 19:16:41 EST 2012

Why does Firefox ask me whether I want to allow storing offline data? What do they want to store?

It's a day behind for me; i's reading 5:14PM on March 20th in SF when it's actually the 21st.

Looks great. I wish there was a screensaver like this with the current time.

It would be nicer if it had and actual globe with the highlighted zone.

Real nice. Can you customize city names and/or their time zone labels?

Let me see all timezones / select custom, and it'd be perfect as a quick check

Nice work

I use this all the time for scheduling meetings across timezones.

It's using my computer's time which is off by quite a bit.

a better one would've allowed to add a new TZ and sort the ones displayed on screen...

Absolutely awesome!

ancient

So? I've never seen it before. Not everyone can be as hip as you.

Glad you guys like it. I designed it, my husband Thomas Fuchs built it.

I designed it this way because none of the time zone tools out there reflect the actual nature of time (zones): simultaneous, overlapping lines thru time. ETZ doesn't just give you the answer, it helps you create a useful model of understanding to take with you & use even when you're not looking at ETZ.

We've been slowly improving it, so expect more options for customizing the tz's you see & static links to times in the future, etc.

EDIT: if you like the design of ETZ, you will probably love Freckle, which is our time tracking / productivity tool -- all about making your data painless to get, then super useful & actionable: http://letsfreckle.com/startups/

>static links to times in the future this would be awesome, sharing of dates is the one feature missing form this cool tool (which made it into my bookmarks toolbar by the way, next to gmail and basecamp)

Looks like Thomas hacked it in this morning. Click the "link to this page" in the top right. It doesn't add it to your clipboard or anything but you can c&p from the address bar.

I really like the visualization aspect. It's a nice design.

I do have some nits to pick. When opening the page the only time displayed is my local time, which is the only time I don't need since I already know it. Clicking somewhere shows me times, but try as I might I can't seem to get it to show me the current time in other time zones. This is the most common (and default) thing I would want to see, and I can't seem to get it at all.

Thanks for pointing that out, it used to work, think maybe Thomas introduced a bug when he totally reimplemented it last week :)

I love it. But I have a minor nitpick: it pollutes the browser history too much; every single action or click introduces a new history link, I had to press back about 20 times before I came back to HN.

Thanks for your feedback. We'll look into how we can make the links copy & pasteable without that annoying side effect.

Just make sure the first open is in a new tab!

I've only briefly looked at this but everything looks awesome. One thing that would be great would be including the various abbreviations next to the time areas.

eg. I'm currently in Sydney where the time is referred to as AEDST (Australian Easter Daylight Savings Time)

My biggest peeve with timezones is seeing something like "Live at 6PM PST!" and I have absolutely no idea what PST is, when it is, etc.

Note: as far as im concerned anything like that should always have a countdown timer to go along with it.. it instantly solves the problem for everyone as they can figure out what time that will be very easily.

Eastern* not Easter!

I thought I recognized this - wasn't something very similar to this used on the demo documents for the scripty framework a year or so ago?

Its a nice looking finished product, I'd like to go back and see how the framework looks now...

Glad it's being improved upon, I've been using it regularly for over a year now!

Awesome! That's Thomas Fuchs from Scriptaculous, no? Scriptaculous is what caused me to learn JS, and by exention, to go from just dabbling with HTML-only static pages to actually doing web developing (which is now my career).

I love that one-page design for Freckle, but you might want to add a trial sign-up button at the top too for us impatient types! (I know it's not the 'real' landing page which is letsfreckle.com, curious as to why you would point us to this smallish version? A/B testing experiment?)

Everytimezone looks awesome! My remarks on the design, but I understand it's still a work in progress of course: - don't just show cities, but also zones like 'Central European Time' or 'GMT' or 'Central time'. - in the cities, include their timezone (GMT-1, GMT+3, etc) - why just limit it to 'know'? When scheduling a meeting for within a couple of days I think it would be cool if I could scroll to the right to see how things are in that day. Or perhaps provide an input field to set the 'central' day viewed in the tool or something.

time.is does it better in their "here & there" function. choose a few cities, shows a tabular comparison of all timeslots. this is what you need to determine the best time slot for a telco with multiple international participants.

Question: Why did the title of this post change? Was it the original submitter who changed it? If no, who?

https://img.skitch.com/20120321-81k4yxffg161n1rh9f2dc4kf56.p...

I have no official standing on this site, but reading the guidelines:

  > Please don't do things to make titles stand out, ...
  > You can make up a new title if you want, but if you
  > put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may
  > rewrite it.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes, please, let's avoid the linkbaiting and inflation. Ah, better now.

Neat idea and execution, but I wish there would be possibility to add your own cities/time zones. Also 24 hour format.

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