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Show HN: Analog Watch

analog.watch

107 pointsezekg96 comments

This fun game just made me realize that actually using analog watch does not require converting the time to HH:MM.

I've been using analog watch for years, my Apple Watch face is set to analog and, apparently, I read the time as "it's almost 11", but never as "it's 10:58".

The same “kids across the street” I reference in another comment needed translation from “quarter to eleven” when they’d ask the time. Makes sense given they couldn’t read an analog face at the time.

Similarly, when I moved from the UK to Canada, people often didn't understand what I meant when I said it was "half ten", which is the common way of saying ten thirty, at least where I grew up.

I never heard that when I lived in the UK in the 70s, but only in Ireland in the late 90s.

I’m a “quarter past” person but I’ve always been confused by “half ten” (which thankfully isn’t used in Australia). But in German, “half ten” means 9:30, which is make more sense to me (probably because I’m used to how German speech often drops words, which is less common in English)

For "half ten" we're just dropping a word from "half past ten".

How does one get to "half ten" in German? Is it simply starting from "half to ten"?

Halfway to ten.

05:00

This actually makes more sense!

>How does one get to "half ten" in German? Is it simply starting from "half to ten"?

Never thought about it much but I think you're spot on. English uses "half past" and therefore "half 10" means 10:30, whereas most other languages use "half to" which causes "half 10" to mean 9:30.

One would think this should cause confusion for international meetings often enough to be common knowledge, but I didn't know until today...

“Halfway to” -> “half”

Well we only disagree 1/60 of the time so it's probably fine as long as we avoid meetings at exactly the half hour.

English thinkers might also want to consider the fact that 0930 is half-way through hour 10

Yes but it’s uncommon in English to simply drop a word from a sentence while pretty common in German casual discourse.

The only other English common case I can think of is the American “I could [not] care less” dropping “not” which is also confusing.

Next, go to Germany or the Netherlands where half ten means 9:30.

Half ten? So.. 5. Got it.

I was thinking 10:30.

Some Americans say ‘a quarter of X’ and even after 30 years I can’t remember if that’s before or after hour X.

Before. Source: born and raised Midwesterner.

As a Canadian, I've never heard anyone say half ten. I do hear half past ten regularly, so you'd figure it'd click :)

My 18 year old daughter is the same (and also can't read an analog clock). Despite me using "quarter to," "quarter past," and "half past" regularly throughout her life. And we having analog clocks in most communal spaces in our house. And we drilled her on analog clocks for two summers in a row...

yeah, i've been using cheap mechanical analog watches and wouldn't trust it to be accurate to-the-minute by the end of the day anyway. i kind of enjoy knowing only the approximate time.

Long ago I used KDE's "fuzzy clock." the fuzziness was adjustable to as high as "middle of the week," which is funny but not very practical. At a higher resolution it was fun for a while.

That's because one doesn't usually look at their watch to find out what the time is: most of the time (pun unintended) we want to how much time is left for an activity, or for an activity to start.

As in, how many more minutes before my flight takes off, or how much time left for this exam?

Yep this is why I prefer analog watches. They are much faster to internalize the time but slower to convert to numbers. Because it’s an abstraction I innately know as someone who learned to read them as a child they are very familiar and easy to read. You really only need the actual numbers when someone asks you for the time.

Technology Connections did a really great video on this a few years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag

Apparently being raised with analog clocks vs digital changes how one intuits the passage of time.

The classic example of this is when someone sees you check your watch, then they ask the time, and you have to check the watch again to see what time it actually is. A comment is almost always made about how the watch was just checked.

"Well, surely some time has passed since I read it last...you weren't asking me what time it was the last time I checked, were you?"

How about speed and speedometers in cars? For some reason I prefer digital readouts of speed while I prefer analog faces for watches/clocks.

Well, maybe because digital is better at showing small differences in this case? Like on a 50kmh road, dropping below 50 is quite noticeable in digital, less so with a line above or below another line.

But for the revs, I think it's quite clear that the analog is better.

Maybe one way to put it would be how important an exact value is? For the speed, it is. For revs, the relative value and its change is much more important and humans track movement much better.

It’s because speedometers aren’t showing a fraction of a whole. Analog clocks work by showing how far through the minute/hour/12 hour period you are. Speedometers are just sticks pointing at numbers. Analog speedometers do however do a better of representing your acceleration than digital ones because the speed of the dial does show acceleration.

> They are much faster to internalize the time but slower to convert to numbers.

People keep saying that, but even after trying all my life, I still can't read analog clocks without mentally "decoding" the exact time. And I'm usually good at quickly building visual intuitions!

Though I think I experience what you're describing, just with digital clocks. For those it feels like I'm not reading 4 separate digits, as if the general "shape" is enough.

Same, I find it easier to see time on analogue. When I see 3:30 for example, in my head I see hands of a watch (in-fact, a very particular watch I grew up seeing in the shade in courtyard). I visualize not just the watch but the lighting at that time of day as well. Gives me perfect sense of how late or early in the day that time means.

Do you live on the equator?

03:30 is anywhere from dead of night to nearly dawn for me. Similarly 15:30 is anywhere from near midday to near sundown.

I meant 3:30 at the day time aka 15:30

Yes, if you use an analog indicator for an analog parameter, you can skip a „parse” step. Similarly, airplanes use analog indicators, or digital ones that either mimic their analog counterparts, or in some way incorporate visual aids that go past a number. This allows the pilot to, at a glance, check the values, see the rate of change, get a useful readout even if the value is noisy or oscillating.

I got a mechanical watch with a 24-hour dial, and I see it as “mid-morning”, “late afternoon” etc.

It does annoy me that it’s harder to find 24-hr dials with noon at the top and midnight at the bottom. They all put midnight at the top for some reason.

Have you ever run in to issues sharing your interpretation?

Like, people ask me the time, I say "almost 11", and they insist "but what time is it rEallY" and it's like...it really is almost 11, if you required access to the information that it is 10:58, you'd have the access to determine that. There's no world in which you need to know when it is 10:58 and do not have the ability to determine that.

If you're asking, you need exactly the general read I just offered.

As a habitually right-on-time person, I disagree. I time things down to seconds, not minutes. I'm rarely ever late and almost never early, but to be that way, I need to know exactly what time it is. And if I'm asking, it's because my watch is broken, and the general read you offered is exactly useless to me.

Most people asking just need the general time, but if they follow up asking for the precise time and you know what it is, it's for a good reason that you've obviously never considered. It's up to you to help them out, or give them a hard time for no good reason. Your choice will say a lot about you.

If you really needed the exact specific time, you'd be wrong to trust a random analog watch anyway because you know how inaccurate they are given how much you care about time.

Your entire hostility is based on the assumption that I do know the actual time, which I usually don't because I don't live my life like that. I cannot handle either the anxiety of waiting until the last minute to do something or the friction of being upset in traffic or being perturbed over someone showing up "five minutes late when they damn well knew the meeting was at WX:YZ" or whatever.

I am almost always early, and can't remember the last time I was late, but I don't mind that at all because I am far more comfortable spending a few minutes meditating, gathering my thoughts, planning, etc in between events than acting like I'm speed running life.

My point was more referring to the many instances in which I know the person and the situation and know that the exact time is both irrelevant and not likely offered by my watch.

> Have you ever run in to issues sharing your interpretation?

Not really.

Of course, having an analog Apple Watch face does not mean that don't know the exact time for the cases when I need to know the minutes, e.g. for a train departure time or things like that. It's just a mental calculation that I don't normally perform when I quickly look at my watch.

I would agree that people who need to know the time up to a minute normally won't ask because they likely have their own device showing it; and if they don't, they most likely don't need to know it up to a minute. But if they indeed do, I don't have problems with converting the watch time to HH:MM.

I like your take, but specifically to the Apple Watch: I’ve been using it for 10 years, and still find it annoying that Apple ships so few high-quality digital faces.

It’s either cutesy stuff with one complication or overwhelming complex ones.

haha same

This could be good for kids to learn how to read analog clocks. I remember this being something we did in school as kids... racing to read a clock faster than the other kid, to move on to the next section of an obstacle course. From what I understand that is becoming a lost skill.

Ten years ago the kids across the street from us (who were 9-10 at the time) would ask the time, and I’d show them my watch. They’d still ask what time it was because they couldn’t read the analog face on my watch.

The oldest is in college now. Next time I see her, I’ll ask if she ever learned to read an analog face.

> kids to learn how to read analog clocks [...] From what I understand that is becoming a lost skill.

I don't think kids need to learn to read analog clocks anymore, in the same way that we don't teach kids to use slide rules. Technology has advanced enough that analog clocks have joined polaroid cameras and vinyl records in the "obsolete technology that some people use for nostalgia or fashion" category.

(for the record, I grew up with analog clocks and I am fully fluent in using them.)

> Technology has advanced enough that analog clocks have joined polaroid cameras and vinyl records

assumption digital 'more advanced' than analog.

unclear. How digital more 'advanced'? Is regression, not advance.

Analog watch. See gap between minute hand and start of meeting. See gap get smaller. Instant.

Colleague in different time zone? See hour hand -3 steps, faster than "14 - 3 is 11". If digital even have 24 hr time, many no.

Teach kids. Analog visible, easy to read, child can see. Child can turn hands on wooden clock, manipulate. Now plus 1 hour, now plus 1.5 hours. Move long hand forward 1 rotation, 1.5 rotations.

Digital? Teach kids "now plus 90 minutes" digital? Hard math. now plus 90 is now (hour) plus 1 and now (minute) plus 30. Teach kids "now minus 10". Does hour change? Why hour change? why now hour different from now minute? daddy daddy what about now seconds? All abstract, cannot touch. Daddy why move hour number first?

Digital. 1 on microwave less than 99. Where else in world 1 < 99 makes sense? Digital time math crazy.

The technology I was thinking of was digital screens. Analog clocks made sense when the best you could do was attach some arrows to some gears on a rotating shaft. Now we can individually toggle lights in a grid containing millions of lights.

> Digital. 1 on microwave less than 99. Where else in world 1 < 99 makes sense? Digital time math crazy.

Everywhere? 1 is always less than 99 everywhere.

I press 1 on my microware. It starts to run for 1 minute.

I press 99 on my microwave. It starts to run for 99 seconds.

1 minute < 99 seconds.

Yes, they're different units. Just like how 1 month is less than 99 days and 1 pound is less than 99 ounces. That isn't a digital vs analog thing.

This isn't anything to do with digital time, it's just a convenience of recent microwaves. The digital microwaves of the 1990s did not have this feature, but they were still digital. If you input 1, you just got 1 second.

On microwaves that do have this feature, set the power first to bypass it.

There are still analog clocks all over the place in public spaces. Sure, a person probably has their phone on them, but it seems strange that people wouldn't want to know how to read them instead of just seeing them as weird slowly moving art installations.

Analog clocks also have the benefit of being able to better visualize time. A lot of people with ADHD talk about time blindness. One common thing sold to them are analog countdown timers that look like a big pie chart. An analog watch effectively does the same thing, especially a dive watch. The user can see how much time they have instead of needing to calculate it and try to translate that into some kind of meaning. Rarely does anyone need to know the exact time, and the analog clock shines at giving an approximate time quickly, to see progress, without actually ever having to know what time it is. A progress bar for the day, if you will.

One of my favorite watches is one with a single hand and a 24-hour dial. I like it for weekends and vacation. I want a watch, I want to know roughly where I'm at in the day, but I don't want to stress about the minutes.

"One common thing sold to them are analog countdown timers that look like a big pie chart."

For anyone looking for one of these, you can search for 'time timer'.

Watches and clocks just aren't ageing out as quickly as so much other tech. Analog watches also have the advantage of being able to so someone why our clocks are the way they are, by comparing them to solar clocks.

Also it would be a bit to close to Futurama to see e.g. Big Ben get a digital overhaul.

Analog clocks are still being taught in schools, at least partially, for their mathematical education purposes. The age at with kids learn to read analog clocks is the same age where kids are skip counting and starting to see numbers in different modes of representations, both of which analog clocks provide, forcing kids to think mathematically in their everyday lives. Further in their math education, it also becomes a helpful jumping off point for understanding modulo arithmetic and non-base 10 counting systems.

By that logic they don’t need to learn much at all. They can just ask AI.

It can also be lost over time! I finished high school (which had analog clocks in all the classrooms) a long time ago, and have always used digital clocks in my adult life.

I recently purchased an analog watch on a lark, and it took me a week or two of use before I could read it quickly again!

It seems to not support 24h? When I see e.g. 17:35 I want to type 17:35 instead of 5:35. Probably because I very seldomly see 5:35 in real life! Interesting observation by itself, but slightly annoying that I have to convert to 12h for this game.

Interesting! There is no am/pm, but I could definitely add it!

How about a simple light/dark theme where it's 0100 when dark and 1300 when light?

Now when people ask me what time it is and I say 1845, they often follow up with "What time is it really for normal people?"

Quarter 'til 19 of course.

I did the very same thing. Interesting phenomenon. I mainly use "analog watches", well, they're facsimiles of analog watches on digital devices.

Ha! Got a good laugh.

Two suggestions:

- Let me enter the time with my keyboard - Make your input numpad match a PC keyboard's numpad, not a phone's

I may have missed numpad support because I have a 60% keeb! Normal number keys work fine for me. Will investigate.

For some reason this brings back memories of looking for clocks or strangers with a watch while walking around a department store or mall

I mustve forgotten how common 'public' clocks used to be. Now... not even the clock on my local town hall is correct

This was fun! Good call on directing to the free play before jumping into the daily challenge. I was disappointed when I realized there was no leader board for the daily challenge.

Thanks for playing. It's been a fun little game I play to make sure I don't embarrass myself when somebody asks me what time it is, since I wear a lot of watches. I'd love to add a global leaderboard, but right now it's all client-side! A server-authoritative leaderboard seemed a bit too complex, especially i.r.t. preventing cheating, but I might tackle it at some point.

I did find it easier to do but that's because I wear analog watches everyday (I don't need distractions on my wrist).

The other comments did remind me that when asked for the time I always give an estimate quickly and then read the exact time a little later. I almost always round to the nearest minute or quarter of an hour, and almost never read the seconds hand.

Fun game!

Could this be extended to lean into teaching quantum physics ?

Include seconds/ sub seconds hand in the watch, and people will realize the watch face time + time it takes to read will never equal the watch face time.

You can know the exact time, by looking at the analog watch face, or you can measure it (convert it) but it will not be the same anymore.

Correcting your previously-entered time by selecting the hour and tapping a different number doesn’t work. It initially shows the hour selected but then overwrites the right-most component (eg seconds)

Thanks for the report! Will try and fix this in the next release.

To OP, you should look into Barbara Arrowsmith-Young's clock exercises. They start with a single hand, and add more and more hands until the units get out into centuries or millennia.

Fun game! Definitely needed the practice rounds. Would love to see a comparison of some sort of how well everyone else did.

analog.watch Daily Challenge 2026-07-09

Score: 22,020 Time: 32.0s

The daily challenge doesn't seem to work for me. 58 seconds for the second clock is correct yet it said I was just close.

Are you sure you weren't "close" on something else, e.g. hour/min?

Thanks, but no.

Fun game. I would suggest a competative mode with more clocks. Gets people to actively play against one another

my only issue is that it cares if you are off by 1 minute, meanwhile in the real world a lot of analog clocks have continuously moving minutes and a lot of others have ticking minutes (they only move right at the minute mark).

Appreciate the feedback! It cares, yeah, but being off-by-a-minute doesn't really dock your overall score very much. I figured without that, a "perfect" would be much less meaningful.

I don't think jumping minutes are very common at all, right? If it took A. Lange & Söhne inventing it in 1999, it's gotta be rare https://www.alange-soehne.com/eu-en/manufacture/art-of-watch...

That's just presenting improvements to a mechanism; while it isn't common, particularly for watches, and I don't know much about earlier examples, they do seem to exist.

For clocks, however, there is the iconic Swiss railway clock [1], which dates back to 1944 and has a jumping minute. For those, however, the jump is actually meaningful in itself, in they're synchronized by a master clock that has a one minute impulse, and the jump is actually the moment of the impulse.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock

would be nice if the results also showed the analog watch positions.

Good idea! I'll see if I can add into the next release.

Hmm, 12AM/PM watch faces don't register 0 as the hour.

Well, that was harder than expected.

Ha! It's quite embarrassing isn't it? Practice makes perfect!

you’ve basically turned ‘can you read an analog face?’ into a little daily ego check. nice.

Ha! Very true. I embarrass myself regularly with this little game. :)

Off topic but it annoys me so much that Apple decided not to make the hands see-through as they pass the day window on the face. Like even the actual analog clocks do this with a little window on the hand?

I once saw a watch that had a button to move the hands out of the way to see the complications. I submitted feedback to Apple that they should add something like this. With it being digital, they have all kinds of options, like having the hands fly off and grow back over a few seconds.

nice!

analog.watch Daily Challenge 2026-07-09

Score: 8,946 Time: 39.2s

Challenge Complete 29,493 Completed in 22.3s Nailed it! You've got great timing.

lol, this completely misses the point of analogue watches or clocks.

It should be called 'keypad data entry game' instead.

The point of an analogue clock is that it gives you an instant sense of the rough time at a glance. I can immediately see it's 'about half past' or 'only a few minutes left until the meeting at 11' or whatever.

That works great until somebody sees your watch and asks you for the exact time!

Then just show them the watch, or look at your phone or whatever.

How often do you need the exact time, and don't have a means to get it, like in tv broadcasting etc?

> or look at your phone or whatever

> have a means to get it ... in tv broadcasting etc

I think you're missing the point of wearing an analog watch, which is fine, but still missing the point nonetheless. :)

As an avid watch wearer, all analog, I built the game so I could improve my skills, because under pressure when somebody asks "what time is it?", I want to be able to tell them exactly, because I should be able to read it! I think it's good to want to improve your skills, whatever that may be. You shouldn't bar people from that because you disagree.

I don't disagree you should improve your skills. but I don't think your app is optimized for that.

But, ok you're the gamemaker, then well done building something, and I hope people enjoy it.

For me, an analogue watch is good for giving you an extremely glance-able approximate time. And potentially as exquisite mechanical jewellery. If you need to know the really exact time to the second and want to be able to tell it quickly, you might be better with a digital watch, especially vs a mechanical watch where a mickey-mouse digital is more accurate than even a COSC mechanical.

But my initial point is that your game is not so much about recognizing the time, even the exact time, but about entering it into the keypad.

Maybe add a multiple-choice mode - show the analogue clocks, pick the digital match.

love it

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