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When To Chat: Reconcile Time Zone Differences
- oefrha 7y agoI tried some major cities around the world and it’s hit or miss. E.g. Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul and Sidney are all missing. Edit: Okay, the locations are fetched from Google Map’s auto complete service, with only the top five results, so when I enter say Beijing I get unhelpful results like some Beijing Pie House in Alhambra, CA. Probably want to limit to cities if possible, no one is entering local street/establishment names here.
- akuji1993 7y agoWeird.. It even found my hometown, which is a random town of 15k people in Germany.
- oefrha 7y agoThat’s because it’s much less likely to have restaurants named after a random town than Beijing or Seoul.
- forgingahead 7y agoDo you live in akuji1993kleinstadt?
- nerdponx 7y agoWhy would it use Google Maps instead of the usual time zone database cities?
- mrcu5 7y agoThat's the whole point of the site. If I'm trying to figure out what time it is for my co-worker in Canberra Australia, I don't want to have to Google what time zone they are in (Australian Eastern Daylight Time). Just put the city in and it does the math for you.
- gtyras2mrs 7y agoI mean, other sites[0] that I've used seem to have a list of major cities (not Google Maps autocomplete) [0] https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
- nerdponx 7y agoI'm talking about the official "tz" database, which contains a large list of cities and geographic coordinates. So if you want to autodetect, you just need approximate lon/lat and then grab the closest tz city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
- madeofpalk 7y ago> Sidney If you're thinking of the city in Australia, it's Sydney. Probably explains why when you search for Sidney it comes up with small towns in USA.
- oefrha 7y agoI think I only made the typo when I typed the comment here but I can’t check now since the service has exceeded quota.
- skrebbel 7y agoNice idea! Bonus points for the 24h toggle. Note: It doesn't work in Edge. I select places and times and nothing happens.
- swinglock 7y agoMy home and my office are not on different continents, so I'm not sure why this is handy of WFH specifically. :)
- tellarin 7y agoMine sometimes are. ;)
- service_bus 7y agoAlso worth noting is that in windows 10 you can add two additional clocks to the main one. Very helpful when you are usually focused on just a few timezones in particular.
- cerberusss 7y agoIndeed, macOS supports something similar. The notification center has a World Clock widget. I've got friends in Illinois, India and Australia, and it's incredibly useful to have a couple of clocks right there.
- DonHopkins 7y agoWould it be more space efficient to just add more hands to the same clock face?
- banana_giraffe 7y agoCan you even get Windows 10 to show an analog clock? More importantly, that doesn't show you AM/PM, or the differences in days, both of which are important. (And there are edge cases where just another hour hand wouldn't be enough)
- DonHopkins 7y agoWhen I was at Sun, somebody hacked up a version of Michael Power's classic NeWS "Glass Clock" tool (that shaped the window so that it only showed the hands and the 12 tick marks, so its face was transparent and mouse clicks passed through it), so it ran setuid root in order to call stime() to set the operating system's time, which it let you easily do by simply dragging the hands around the face, just like a real clock! ("Temporal Direct Manipulation"!) This is the original version, without that hack: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/utilities/clocks/glass/ https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/utilities/... % Glass is an implementation of a NeWS clock that I wrote to % experiment with shaped canvases. The clock is shaped like the % the hands and tick marks thereby allowing you to "see through' % the face to whatever lies behind. Because of the bug concerning % stroking a canvas path the face must redraw every time it is % updated (gross). As it turns out, it REALLY SUCKS to have a clock that made it so easy to accidentally change the time on your workstation! The way the glass clock could float unobtrusively above your other windows, it was really easy to accidentally hit the hour or minute hand with the mouse and move it without noticing, then you'd miss meetings because your entire workstation would have the wrong time! Unless you were running it over the network on a different server, then you'd change the time for everybody else using that server, so they would miss their meetings too!
- thih9 7y agoFeature request: support for multiple cities, could be handy for scheduling group calls in distributed teams.
- dicytea 7y agoAny way to just input GMT/UTC timezones directly? Seems more practical that way.
- Timpy 7y agoI think this works well, I live in Eastern US and I'm interested in talking to somebody in Hokkaido, Japan... I just instinctively typed "New York" and "Toyko" time.
- anonymfus 7y agoWell Japan is one timezone, and you know how US timezones work because you live in it. I wonder what would be your mental process if you see an online event with time specified in MSK+3.
- wfh_man 7y agoMy company seems to block this website so now I'll never know when to chat.
- Tepix 7y agoNice idea, but it's buggy! If you try more than one pair of cities (with different time differences), the table below the displayed time zone difference will not update.
- gingericha 7y agoHad a similar issue, I had to hit the 12/24 hour button to get the table to update.
- kareemm 7y agoI’ve used https://worldtimebuddy.com https://worldtimebuddy.com for this purpose for years.
- aikinai 7y agoYes! This is the best interface for checking time zones and I've always wondered why it's not more common.
- diggan 7y agoSame here, more features and less waste of space than this submission. Even though this submission has more modern design I'd still prefer worldtimebuddy, especially because you can have more people than just two.
- riskneutral 7y agoCame here to say this. Excellent interface.
- ciroduran 7y agoGreat tool. May I suggest putting the date when you'd like to chat? Considering that in Europe the clock change comes next Sunday 29th, this could confuse some people if they'd like to chat sometime in a few days.
- blauditore 7y agoFor those using Google Calendar, there's a feature for showing people's working hours: https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/7638168?hl=en https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/7638168?hl=en
- tezza 7y agoThis very simple tool helps: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html It rocks with Daylight Saving time transitions too (UK one coming up soon)
- mikehollinger 7y agoI’ve used this for years!
- haldora 7y agoPlus you can use it for 4+ cities/timezones!
- madeofpalk 7y agoI really like https://everytimezone.com https://everytimezone.com It's what I've been using for years.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mwexler 7y agoBig fan. Great and simple tool.
- waitandbleed 7y agoAgreed. Very useful
- RichardCA 7y agoIt's not perfect. For example March 29 is a 23 hour day in the UK but we don't see that reflected in the app.
- DonHopkins 7y agoIt's good to check, because different places switch to and from daylight savings time on different dates, so you're not always the same number of hours apart during the transition! I've missed meetings before because of that: "I was there, where were you?" "I was there too! Where were YOU?"
- mitul_45 7y agoWow, I had exactly this idea when I moved to the Netherlands! My friends and distant family members would call at weird times without checking if it's early morning or night here.
- michaelmior 7y agoDoesn't seem to work at all for me. Seeing the error below in the console > You have exceeded your rate-limit for this API. For more information on usage limits and the Google Maps JavaScript API services please see: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/usage https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...
- saurik 7y agoThe user interface seems to assume someone isn't awake across midnight, which doesn't make much sense to me; like, if you want to try to coordinate a meeting with me, and you expect me to be functional during it, it really needs to be scheduled between 2pm and 4am, but I can't enter that time range due to how this slider works :(. (Speaking of which, it is nearing 5am, so I should probably start heading to sleep.)
- DonHopkins 7y agoI know what you mean! I'm always awake through midnight. The slider range should turn "inside-out" when you drag the end time to the left of the start time.
- dveeden2 7y agoThis doesn't seem to work correctly for say London and Theran as the difference is not a round number of hours. Otherwise looks useful. Support for comparing with more than two parties would be nice
- DonHopkins 7y agoI thought Warsaw was the last country with a non-hourly time zone, UTC+01:24, which they wisely abandoned ages ago, in 1915. Why on Earth would Tehran use such an arbitrary time zone offset? At least they're off by a half hour, instead of 24 minutes. But what possible reason could there be to do something like that, anyway? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B01:24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B01:24 >On 5 August 1915, Warsaw switched to Central European Time, and the rest of Poland quickly followed suit. Edit: Apparently Dublin Mean Time was even weirder than Warsaw's time zone, weighing in at UTC-00:25:21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%E2%88%9200:25:21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%E2%88%9200:25:21 >UTC−00:25:21 was used in Ireland as Dublin Mean Time. >Dublin Mean Time was introduced by the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act, 1880,[1] which also defined Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as legal time in Great Britain. This Act replaced local mean time, which had been held to be the legal time since Curtis v. March in 1858, throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. >From 3:00 am Dublin Summer Time on Sunday 1 October 1916, the Time (Ireland) Act, 1916[2] changed the time used in Ireland to be the same as that used in the UK, both during daylight saving time and at other times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_Republic_of_Irelan... >John Dillon opposed the first reading of the Time (Ireland) Bill for having been introduced without consultation of the Irish Parliamentary Party; he said the different time in Ireland "reminds us that we are coming into a strange country".
- tacomonstrous 7y agoYou should look up Nepal if you want to be really ticked off.
- DonHopkins 7y agoOn one hand, that ticks me off so much I want to clean their clock, but on the other hand, at least they have a round number of seconds. I'm having a hard time in the face of all this tock about temporal diversity.
- dbg31415 7y agoI've always liked the design of this one. https://everytimezone.com/ https://everytimezone.com/
- thunderbong 7y agoI like this one - https://everytimezone.com https://everytimezone.com
- moritonal 7y agoI wrote a similar PWA site when I was doing long distance with my now wife! https://canicall.info/ https://canicall.info/
- HFrank 7y agoTried in Safari and Chrome. Doesn't work.
- magicalhippo 7y agoReminds me of a postmortem of I think it was Carmageddon, some game anyway. In it they mentioned that the programmers were all in Australia, and the management and the rest were in the UK, and that arrangement was just perfect because they'd all be online at the same time.
- throwaway413 7y agoNice tool. I personally use https://spacetime.am https://spacetime.am (no affiliation, just like it).
- BurningFrog 7y agoAs I keep saying, we'll all move to UTC in 1-3 decades.
- tacomonstrous 7y agoHow is that going to help anything? This is an issue with human circadian rhythms, not with conventions of keeping time.
- SifJar 7y agoProbably doesn't help with figuring out when to meet, but would maybe help with communicating the time by removing any chance of ambiguity. Or if you're asking e.g. "Does 10.30am work for you?" etc. But really, it's not hard to state the timezone along with the time if there's any chance of confusion.
- BurningFrog 7y agoIt helps with agreeing to do something together online at a certain time. Including announcing online events. Nothing else. But that's enough.
- netsharc 7y ago"Let's set the meeting at 16:00 [UTC is implied]." "Sorry Bob, we in Sydney will be asleep at that time."
- BurningFrog 7y agoYou probably meant that as a counterargument, but to me it shows how simple UTC makes things.
- netsharc 7y agoI edited my comment and it turned to nonsense. What if the Sydneysiders aren't in the call? I'm in Central European Time right now. If I want to set a meeting with New Yorkers, I have to know what time the NYers wake up in my time zone (14:00 here is 9:00 New York - although this might change in 2 days as we'll both be in Summer Time). If I use UTC, I still have to know what time (in UTC) the New Yorkers wake up...
- pachico 7y agoDidn't work for Barcelona
- gingericha 7y agoFor those on macOS, I use the app Clocker[0]. It lives in your menu bar, allows you to input your own desired cities/time zones/locations, has a bunch of different customization options, and also has a "future slider" that allows you to see what time it is in different locations at different times. [0](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clocker/id1056643111?mt=12 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clocker/id1056643111?mt=12)
- rpncreator 7y agoGoogle Calendar has a World Clock functionality built-in. When scheduling events, it will show times in the time zones that you have added under World Clock in settings. The world clock will display on your left sidebar. https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064 https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37064
- rbosinger 7y agoGreat little tool. I love the retro design too.
- cajuncanuck 7y agoNice tool! Better guy that wrote it!
- jopsen 7y agoLove it! Had been needing this forever... I used to use time.is, but this is _decent_ :)
- gshakir 7y agoThere is one crucial feature missing. There should be an option for “multiple” other locations. Since we are all practicing social distancing, I have scheduled a call with 5-10 of my friends over the weekend and they are spread over 5 different time zones and countries. We ultimately found one time that works for all of us using iOS world clock.
- masklinn 7y ago… Before clicking I was fully expecting that you could input basically as many dates as you need to. Just two is not even sufficient to handle my cousins…
- contingencies 7y agoGoogle 2AM in New York (reports local equivalent time) or 4PM in New York in Shanghai (specify the timezone you want conversion to using another place name).
- dpix 7y agoSeems to be lots of negative comments in this thread :( I think this is a great, super simple little tool, nice work! And slack integration is the real killer feature here
- thking 7y agoMeeting planner for multiple locations: https://www.worldtimeserver.com/meeting-planner.aspx https://www.worldtimeserver.com/meeting-planner.aspx
- notananthem 7y agoThis website doesn't work at all in chrome
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- aspaceman 7y agoThis is a great tool! I really like it. Do you have an option for a different color scheme though? Even just a white / black? Don't know why but this color is pretty difficult for me to look at for some reason.
- nwillson 7y agoThanks for the feedback everyone.