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Show HN: Combining UTC and local times (time zones) in one new clock
- gwbas1c 5y agoCool concept! The thing that I like about using A-X is that it helps avoid accidentally confusing "10" between local and UTC. IE, the longer I would use this, the more I get used to knowing that 8:00 is N:00 in my local time. IMO: Something in the html needs cleanup. Depending on my window size, elements are always overlapping. (I'm on Chrome on Windows, with uBlock.)
- hhebbo 5y agoGreat feedback! Yes, that's exactly the concept of letters and numbers for local and global times :) I'll work more on the responsiveness of the interface. There is something to improve every day. Do you work across time zones? If yes, would you like to give hTime a go and test it for some days? I'd love to hear more feedback from daily usage of the clock.
- gwbas1c 5y agoNot anymore. Within a few hours, it's easy to accommodate in my head. But, spanning continents, it's a lot harder. I'm generally in the habit of always saying the time zone when talking across timezones. BTW: Have you ever written a Fitbit watchface? They're pretty easy.
- hhebbo 5y agoFor a few hours and one time zone, you're right it's easy. The confusion starts for me with 2+ time zones in one call/event. I'm thinking about starting with an Apple watch, Android watch first, but I'll check the Fitbit one and build after the apple one, cool idea!
- tomcooks 5y agoHonest q I hope doesn't sound rude: how is this different from @beat swatch time? Looks really nice and I hope you and your process success, you're fixing a problem
- throw_away 5y ago@beat was a full decimalization of time (1000 'beats' per day). This is just giving new, universal names to hours. I can see this working a lot better than the alternative (use GMT/UTC everywhere) as you'd always have mental contention as to whether you meant a time in local or GMT. This way you don't need the additional label. And I could imagine getting used to the idea that my workday lasted from P-X & the other geographical zones had their common hour blocs. Potential issues: * 0/O ambiguity * presumably the day flips over when the hour goes from X->A, which means sometimes it's tomorrow already.
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks for the clarification and feedback! As for the issues: - 0/O: I just fixed that by excluding I & O, and adding Y & Z. - Correct
- hhebbo 5y agoNot at all, thanks for asking and the nice wishes ;) The Internet Time, Beats, is a completely new time/clock system. It’s unclear what 964 for example means. With this clock, I’m using the same time/clock system we all know well: 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds. The addition to that is UTC. Why? To make the clock show the global time as well, and then map the local time with the global time together in one clock face. By this, we can always be in sync locally and globally. The UTC layer in the middle is represented by letters to simply distinguish global from local times. This layer rotates with users according to their location on Earth. Why? To unify the reading of time when doing the mapping, so the reading of time is always the same no matter where users are. I understand that the letters might be confusing a bit, but this can be fixed easily by replacing them with numbers again. Here is an example: 2 days ago there was the Apple event. It was at 10am PDT. I’m not sure what that is in my local time and other local times. If that event would be translated to hTime, it would be at R:00. No matter where we are, we can see the local and global hours for R:00, so no time zone calculations are needed any more. I believe the barrier-to-entry with a 24-hour, 60-minute, 60-second system is simpler than Beat.
- gnrlst 5y agoThis is a classic example of a product that's not been thought through. half-hour and 45min timezones are ignored (and plain wrong when selected on the website). Not to mention it's not very practical as the clock is hard to read.
- maccolgan 5y agoWhy is Jerusalem under Palestine?
- godDLL 5y ago"Palestine/Jerusalem" is a very, eh, historical spelling.
- unobatbayar 5y agoIt would be really useful if anyone could build a Circadian Clock that works for every country/region.
- hhebbo 5y agoHow would that work, can you elaborate more please?
- unobatbayar 5y agoPerhaps my phrasing was incorrect. Let's say I choose a country, United States, and then I'll be able to see a 24-hour clock showing Circadian Rhythms. Perhaps, using precise location via ip address is better.
- quickthrower2 5y agoThings like Calendly make this a non issue.
- cookiengineer 5y agoWe always used Zulu (GMT+0) to coordinate meetings around the globe, but this is a very nice approach to coordinate time differences. Daylight saving times are just way too chaotic around the globe, as every country does their own thing anyways. One thing though: Different countries imply different work hours and laws/regulations. For example, it is illegal to work more than 10 hours in Germany, so most companies stick to the 0800-1630 work time approach whereas the 30 minutes break is also required by law. Something like this would be nice to represent in an overlap/border/chart(?) with colors for each location around the clock so that you can see where times could overlap if you e.g. come late in the office to start work.
- midasuni 5y agoThat would be depressing. If I’m away from work overnight I want to get the work done. I’d rather babysit a system for 15 hours a day for 3 days then go home and have a colleague do it for the next 3, rather than have to do 6 days with both of us on site.
- cookiengineer 5y ago> That would be depressing. If I’m away from hoke overnight I want to get he worked done. I’d rather babysit a system for 15 hours a day for 3 days then go home and have a colleague do it for the next 3, rather than have to do 6 days with both of us on site. Honestly I don't understand your comment!? Why do you have to babysit the system? My suggestion was an extension to the existing clock app that OP made. Nothing prevents OP from making settings storable via localStorage, so I don't know where your assumptions come from?
- midasuni 5y agoSorry posting from a phone which has terrible autocorrect and hadn’t edited. In repose to “illegal to work more than 10 hours in Germany” I had a call last night to go to a field in the middle of nowhere for 3 days to look after an event as the colleague who was supposed to do it has covid. This means sitting on site doing whatever I want, until/unless something goes wrong. The coverage needed is 12 hours a day, so that’s fine, I do the job, get paid the overtime, and another colleague takes over on Saturday to do the same job for a few days. If I was limited to 10 hour days I couldn’t cover 12 hours, we’d need two people on site, and that means I’d have to be away from home twice as long. That’s not a good thing for me
- brainwipe 5y agoI like the idea but for the teams I have worked with, the trouble they have with timing isn't going to be solved by any clock!
- hhebbo 5y agoI'd love to hear more about that. What is the trouble? Maybe I can work on a solution to help.
- cormullion 5y agoThis page (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sandford-fleming-sets-the-worlds-clock-389930/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sandf...) has a picture of a mechanical pocket watch from the 1880s belonging to Sandford Fleming with the letters shown against each hour.
- doovd 5y agoNo J or V, Interesting those were sacrificed.
- gerikson 5y agoProbably for the same reasons mentioned here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28929226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28929226 They're easily confused with I and U, respectively.
- hhebbo 5y agoGood feedback, probably I should be doing the same on hTime as well. I'll test more and see what's best for UX.
- joshspankit 5y agoMaybe he just didn’t like the look of them, and wanted the day to end at Z. You never know when a standard is based on a single person’s subjective choice. I think it’s fascinating personally.
- hhebbo 5y agoCool, Thanks for sharing. I didn't know about Fleming's watch. The problem he was trying to solve back then is represented again today by distributed and remote work. Companies and teams have employees, customers, and parterres all over the world, and the 3-letter time zone system started to be more confusing, especially with daylight saving. UTC is a universal time, but unfortunately it's rare to see it used on a daily basis. The introduction of hTime is to simply bring UTC back as the central time globally and make it easier to use by combining it with local times. So we've got local and global times in one clock.
- garblegarble 5y agoIt's a little unfortunate that they keep the minute part numeric, since this has the same problem as displaying UTC times for India - India Standard Time has a 30-minute offset in addition to an hour offset, so "K:43" in hTime is "16:13" in Delhi.
- gerikson 5y agoMyanmar has a +30m delta too, as has Australian Central Time and Newfoundland. As mentioned elsewhere Nepal has a +45m delta. edit OK I crunched the numbers Country / Pop. / Timezone * Afghanistan 32.9M UTC+04:30 * Central Australia (Northern Territory and South Australia) 246.5k + 1.771M UTC+09:30 * India 1.353B UTC+05:30 * Iran 83.1M UTC+03:30 * Myanmar 55.6M UTC+06:30 * Nepal 28M UTC+05:45 * Newfoundland and Labrador 520k UTC-03:30 This comes out to around 1.556B people or around 20% of the world's population.
- Fnoord 5y agoCan this be used for profiling on the internet? Ie. if someone's clock is 15 minutes before the standard they are residing in Nepal?
- garblegarble 5y agoYes it can and is used for profiling, but it's even easier than that - you can just call "Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone" on modern browsers or use Date's getTimezoneOffset
- hhebbo 5y agoYou're right. Firstly, I don't really understand why those countries decided to go with a 30-minute offset. It's adding even more confusion to the whole time zone and daylight saving thing. hTime utilizes UTC, hence the 30 minutes difference. However, that's something to think more about and see how to fix it properly. Thanks for the feedback. Would you give hTime a go and test it for some days? I'd love to hear more feedback.
- nelox 5y agoReminds me of the time our firm scheduled a training session for cross-cultural awareness, at 1 a.m. local time, on a Saturday. I kid you not.
- hhebbo 5y agoYour firm should use hTime then for scheduling :D They could use the "Meeting Time" https://thehtime.com/intersect https://thehtime.com/intersect feature to make sure it's a good time for everyone.
- midasuni 5y agoNepal is broken (it’s 45 minute offset from norm) I create a meeting Friday at B:00. Is that Thursday or Friday in Sydney? In anchorage? T:00 on Thursday would be in about 7 hours from now for someone in Auckland, but in 31 hours for someone in San Francisco. What about a meeting that occurs at 10am local time in New York every day? What happens when the clock changes. The reason to schedule meetings to a timezone is to account for clock changes, otherwise we could just use UTC and be far less confusing that’s this.
- quickthrower2 5y agoFun fact: my local vaccination centre used Nepal time clock as the “minutes” part for a clock that was 15 minutes slow. Why? That clock showed you the vaccination time that was now safe to leave, having been observed for 15 minutes.
- hhebbo 5y agoThat's an interesting use case! :)
- quickthrower2 5y agoYep I appreciated the “geek” that hacked that up. I hope there was some humour behind it. The “normal” thing would be to get a wall clock and wind it back 15!
- valray 5y agoIntentions are good, but I found this system confusing and not useful for me. I use to use Everytimezone, but find Dateful's dual timezone display more useful for my needs. https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter Edit: Added positive remark about good intentions.
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks for the feedback, I appreciate it! May I ask why do you find it confusing? I’d love to improve it.
- eqvinox 5y agoCommon practice would be to have I and O excluded from use since they're commonly confused (I/J/1/l and O/Q/0.) (And as other comments have noted, this breaks down in utility with 15/30min TZ offsets as well as when crossing the date line.)
- seanalltogether 5y agoI work in the UK for a company based out of Denver. I know that I need to subtract 7 hours from my time to figure out the local time there, and they need to do it in reverse. But with this H time I would have to subtract 7 letters from my time to understand what the relative local time in Denver is. Sure it's P:30 for both of us, but I don't know what P minus seven is to know if that's when noon is and they may or may not be at lunch.
- globular-toast 5y agoThat could be solved with software that displayed the local time for each participant you add to an event. But then I guess I don't see the point of this any more.
- hhebbo 5y agoTrue, but not for all events. For example, webinars or global events like SpaceX's launch or the Olympics games. If a game starts at 2pm Tokyo time, I have no direct clue what that could be in my local time. If the game starts at N:00, then I know in my mind what that is.
- bellyfullofbac 5y agoI guess the idea is you'd have to know "Our Denver office hours are between H and W, and they have lunch at hour P.", so you don't schedule meetings at P:00. But well, I don't think it really works. Add another timezone to the mix and you're going to get a jumble of letters you won't remember, you'll have to write it down, and at that point you might as well use a diagram like this: https://everytimezone.com https://everytimezone.com (which I think can also be made analog, just add a few lines for "Lunchtime in London", "Lunchtime in Denver", etc.
- hhebbo 5y agoYes, I'm hearing this more now about the letters. It obviously seems that the letters make it harder to comprehend which I understand. Do you think replacing letters with numbers would help? Then you'd see both local and global (UTC) times in numbers, that would probably make it easier to use.
- rini17 5y agoWe need a standard for serializing both time and place in order to specify local time. It is already done ad-hoc using "continent/city" timezone database. Current three-letter timezones have the disadvantage that a place can change a timezone.
- mark-r 5y agoTimezones can change when specified by continent/city too. The bigger problem with three-letter zone names is that they're not unique. I found 3 different definitions of CST for example.
- hhebbo 5y agoanother problem with the 3-letter system is that it's not always 3 letters. With daylight saving CST become CEST which is then +-1 different depending where you are. With hTime and bringing UTC into the clock, I'm aiming at eliminating the need to think of the 3-letter system altogether. If I know what time globally is (UTC) and what it means in my local time, then I won't need to know what CET or PT is anymore. hTime gets the job done using "one clock". The idea of UTC here is that it's a rotating UTC. So hTime utilizes where you are on Earth and uses that to rotate UTC accordingly so you get the same reading of time everywhere. That's a global time concept, which what UTC is about.
- false 5y agoWould be nice if "BrandonText-Light" font supported `font-variant: tabular-nums` — this would prevent digital clock display from slight horizontal jumps on each second change.
- hhebbo 5y agoGreat feedback, I'll check that and try to fix soon. Thanks!
- maltalex 5y agoReminds me of Swatch's "Internet Time" from the 90's - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- hhebbo 5y agoThe issue with Internet Time is that it used a completely new approach of time. It's hard to know what 965 means in our local time. The idea here is to simply keep the 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds and add UTC to that making the clock showing both local and global times. And then rotate UTC according to the location which then unifies the reading of time everywhere. Something Internet Time didn't do.
- nixpulvis 5y agoHow is this any better than just using UTC written as 14:15Z? It is a bit nice to hide the number that is not correct, but it makes the lookup a little harder than an offset too. Not to mention the worst part which is that hour hour goes by but there is no numerical increment to see.
- hhebbo 5y agoGreat feedback, thanks! Probably the letters makes it harder to comprehend. Actually there is no difference that writing 14:15Z. The main concept is to map UTC, or Zulu, to our local times in one clock where UTC rotates according to your location on Earth. So all users when they look at the clock at the same time no matter where they are, they'd see the same time. It's a global clock idea. I can simply change the letters to numbers, do you think that'd help?
- joshspankit 5y agoIf changing the letters to numbers, you’re coming down to advocating that everyone use UTC for coordination which makes hTime just a handy tool and not a solution
- hhebbo 5y agoTrue. I'm actually fine with that. Main thing is we find a good way to get rid of time zone math! :)
- nixpulvis 5y agoI was actually arguing that the letter makes it easier to comprehend in a sense, because it forces you to do the mapping, instead of assuming the same zone. That being said, the interface should really put the location closer to the letter ring, because it's somewhat easy to forget you're looking at a localized mapping and what the letters mean, since they are in another UI element. "So all users when they look at the clock at the same time no matter where they are, they'd see the same time." This is true of any clock (unless fancy optics are involved, or we get too deep into physics), two people looking at the same wall clock will see the same time. The problem is that they might want to interpret what they see in a different way. Both UTC and your htime thing are a way to solve that problem. Leading with a letter helps people not start reading as a local time, whereas with 8061 formatted times you only notice it's not in your own locale at the very end of the time. Depending on your use one might be better than the other. Unfortunately time requires that I remember one additional piece of information, namely UTC: X=24, before I can index into the alphabet and calculate the difference myself, whereas UTC simply requires I add the offset to the time and move on with my life.
- hahamrfunnyguy 5y agoI live in the US. Most companies and organizations here use 12 hour time, so I use it too. The work hour selection is using 24 hour time. It would be a nice UX improvement to present the time using the user's current locale settings.
- sneak 5y agoIt is all of our duty when working in/with America/ns to use 24h time as often as possible. Same goes for metric. Americans call it "military time" because the US military uses it. I like to remind people that the entire rest of the world uses it, too, and that 12h time should just be called "American civilian time".
- lupin_sansei 5y agoThis isn’t correct. I’ve lived in UK, Australia, and Japan and all those places use 12 hour time.
- iggldiggl 5y agoAlthough in the UK at least, railways universally use the 24-hour clock, thereby regularly exposing a larger fraction of the population to it (in Australia a quick search seems to indicate that only NSW uses 24 hour time for its timetables?).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- reaperducer 5y agoI like to remind people that the entire rest of the world uses it So the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, most of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Malta, Egypt, Mexico, Nepal, and the Philippines aren't part of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock
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- mro_name 5y agonice idea!
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- Waterluvian 5y agoNewfoundland is 30 mins different. Really this is just an offset in letters. Make the offset in numbers. I love the inner clock face idea.
- hhebbo 5y agoI just fixed the 30-min offset for Newfoundland, here is the fixed time https://thehtime.com/location?name=Canada+-+St.+John%27s https://thehtime.com/location?name=Canada+-+St.+John%27s
- Waterluvian 5y agoGreat! I’m delighted that you’re exploring other ways to describe time zones and offsets given how complicated it all is.
- hhebbo 5y agoWe gotta start somewhere and improve on the go :)
- hhebbo 5y agoGreat feedback! I'm considering that as well, to try the inner clock with numbers. The main idea of letters is to help distinguishing global time (UTC) from local time. So let's meet at 11:00 is local, and let's meet at M:00 is global. I'll try the numbers and test what would be simpler to use for users. Thanks!
- jasode 5y agoOne issue with your graphical clock being modulus-24 is that it interferes with everyone's lifetime exposure to analog clocks that are modulus-12. Losing that spatial awareness of where the hour hand "typically" sits makes it harder to read. I think simple text list of different locations and their current local time is much easier to mentally parse.
- hhebbo 5y agoI hear you. The awareness of the where the hand stands still works for local hours though. When working across-time-zones and scheduling client meetings, the list of local clocks and emails to coordinate become a hassle quickly in my experience.
- jasode 5y ago>The awareness of the where the hand stands still works for local hours though. It doesn't work for local because there's a fundamental difference of geometry between 12 vs 24 subdivisions of a 360 degree circle. Look at the screenshot to see that the hour-hand pointing to "8" are different angles (240 degrees vs 300 degrees): https://imgur.com/a/8DZCeqe https://imgur.com/a/8DZCeqe In your clock, it "looks like 10am" instead of 8am because of the accumulated lifetime repetition of reading traditional 12-hour clocks.
- hhebbo 5y agoAh got what you mean. Yes you're right. I'll think about a solution for that. Maybe some setting for the user to choose either a 24-hour or 12-hour system. It'll be challenging with the letter though, but I'll give it a shot.
- zokier 5y ago24 hour clock faces are not completely novel idea, they have been around for a long time already. Never particularly popular, they have been used more in some niches. Soviets in particular seemed to be fond of them, you can find many Raketas etc with 24h faces. Random modern example of 24h watch https://www.oris.ch/en/watch/blue-eagles-limited-edition/01-653-7631-4684-set https://www.oris.ch/en/watch/blue-eagles-limited-edition/01-...
- danuker 5y agoI believe I'd prefer the remainder of dividing Unix time by seconds in a day.
- hhebbo 5y agoThat also works, but unfortunately not for everyone working remotely and need to schedule meetings, webinars, online conferences, define product deadlines, etc. I'm hoping that hTime is going to simplify all of that by brining UTC back to our everyday life.
- kybernetikos 5y agoI like this. It's probably a lot easier to adopt than my version which is basically a full day split into 10 parts (basically French Revolutionary Time) but the same across the whole world, and the clock face rotates so that local solar midday is always at the top of the clock. https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks for the feedback. The main concept is to keep using 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds system and build the clock on top of that. Cool clock you have there as well.
- kybernetikos 5y agoI like that you use letters to make it clear which time is being discussed, cool idea and important - the problem with organising cross timezone isn't so much the complication of organising across timezone (you can look up a conversion online instantly and easily), it's more the ambiguity about which time any particular time being mentioned is. I didn't originally create a new week for my system, but knowing which day a meeting is on is important too for meetings that are a long away apart. That's why I created nullday, unday, duoday, triday, quadday, pentday, hexday, heptday, and nonday.
- hhebbo 5y agoyes, that's the concept behind the letters. Cool day names btw!
- keyle 5y agohttps://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- hhebbo 5y agoWell somebody has to do it, otherwise we're stuck
- jedimastert 5y agoTom Scott's rant on time-zones is as relevant as always https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
- hhebbo 5y agoyup, always
- dansimau 5y agoA tool that has been most useful for me when I am scheduling meetings cross-timezone: http://timesched.pocoo.org/ http://timesched.pocoo.org/ IMHO when scheduling, you need to actually understand local time for all your attendees, so you can factor in things like when they are awake/asleep, when they might be driving to work, picking up their kids, etc. But when simply reading/grokking times — i.e. in internal documents or web pages shared across timezones — I usually just want to see the timestamp expressed as my local time. (Browser extension idea: automatically convert all dates/times to my local time, and be able to set rules for common timezone conversions for certain URLs/domains.)
- hhebbo 5y agoGreat feedback. I agree on the point of understating the local times of your attendees. hTime does that as well in the "Meeting Time" feature https://thehtime.com/intersect https://thehtime.com/intersect. Here you can choose the working-hour availability for all attendees so you make sure it's not after 10pm their time for example. You can then copy the link and share. Here is an example of the best meeting time for a meeting taking place San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin. In green, the clock shows the best time is between P-R baring in mind that the available time to meet is between 8 and 19 (7pm). Does that help?
- zaxomi 5y agoA naive approach. Time zones is not that simple. Many timezones have 15, 30, or 45 minutes offset (additional to the hour). If I get time and date in UTC, I know when the meeting is supposed to start. If the time is 12:45 UTC and the meeting is at 16:00 I quickly know that the meeting starts in 3 hours and 15 minutes. Not that easy with M:45 and P:45 I do not like this.
- hhebbo 5y agoNice feedback. Probably the letters make it harder to follow. I'll find a solution for that. I agree with you on knowing how to translate UTC to your time quickly, but one of the situations teams get into is: what is the best time to meet between San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin for example? Here just thinking of UTC won't help unfortunately. hTime solves that as well. Another issue is the time zone names. For example, Apple's event was 2 days ago at 10am PDT, what is that to UTC, and then what's that in my local time? hTime is also trying to solve that by saying the event will take place at R:00, and done.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- new_realist 5y agoWe need human time: two dimensional time zones around major metropolitan areas, where time skews automatically a few minutes every morning at 3 a.m. to ensure that sunrise is the same time each day. No daylight savings jumps, and computers can handle cross-zone scheduling. This is easy to do now that everyone has a smart phone or smart watch.
- hhebbo 5y agoI like the explanation! I believe the 2 dimensional time zones are: local time zone, and global time zone. The local time zones already exist, the global time zone also already exists and it's UTC. hTime puts both in one clock so the reading of time is the same everywhere and still maps this to our local times for our daily life locally. How would you implement your idea? Do you have any sketches or notes about that?
- joshspankit 5y agoWhile we’re at it, can we base weeks and months on the lunar cycle so that we have 13 months of exactly 4 weeks each? Edit: Not sarcasm or a bit. Genuinely. I’d love to be more in sync with nature by having our time reference based on sunrise and the lunar cycles
- godDLL 5y agoI use four suits of 13 weeks/cards, tied to local climate. Winter goes up from A of clubs to K, spring goes down from K of spades to A. A kind of a agricultural calendar. You know when to plant things in the garden, when the peaks of trimming and gardening work are in the year, and when the heatwaves will be over with. It's very nice.
- hhebbo 5y agoThat’s neat!
- hhebbo 5y agoNot a bad idea at all. I'm sure we can tackle that. I actually played around with another concept as well which is using the Sun's location as our reference instead of UTC. This then gives our solar system a unified time, not only Earth. It's an incomplete concept still. I have it here in this blog post https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/introducing-solutions-to-solve-the-mess-of-time-zones-cdf44a7ee4ae https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/introdu... Would love to hear what you think.
- Vel0cityX 5y agoThis is why people make fun of tech bros
- halfeatenpie 5y agoThe concept is interesting and creative but I also think it's just repackaging the problem it's trying to address but using a different element as the datum. This adds an additional step where you have to translate N:45 time to local by remembering how the letters are re-arranged for your specific area. Therefore, I don't think this solution really solves the original/intended problem it's trying to address but rather hides it behind the letters. I'd suggest a good alternative is to just stick with Google Calendar/Microsoft Outlook and/or WorldTimeBuddy.
- potiuper 5y agohttps://unixtimestamp.com https://unixtimestamp.com When stating an offset time the most significant digits that are the same as now could be assumed, and not communicated. Also, for the least significant digits times with no seconds drop one zero; 5 minute intervals drop two zeros. So, a meeting tomorrow at 4 pm assuming EDT is at 8464.
- alexdrue 5y agoI do appreciate the functionality and goal of the app, but it's quite confusing for me. There are many tabs you can use, and it will probably need quite a bit of a learning curve.
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks for the feedback! What are the confusing part except for the tabs? I'd love to work on that and improve it.
- Semaphor 5y agoNo comments about the cookie banner that tells you to "contact them" to change your preferences? Especially as the only cookie the site sets, is the one that you accepted cookies :D
- hhebbo 5y ago:D I'll fix the cookie. Thanks for the feedback!
- electroly 5y agoOP, make sure to test your site with a non-maximized desktop browser that is taller than it is wide. Your site has severe layout issues in this orientation, with text overlapping text, the clock overlapping the text, the links overlapping the logo. It seems like it isn't using the mobile layout, it's trying to show the landscape desktop layout despite the portrait aspect of the browser window. On a mobile device it looks fine when it kicks into the mobile layout.
- hhebbo 5y agoGreat feedback. Noted and I'll work on fixing it.
- ubertaco 5y agoThe thing about the hour -- the part that's being abstracted away here -- is that (in most cases) it carries semantic meaning about daylight and thus about "waking-world" and circadian-rhythm expectations. Yes, with timezones and UTC-offsets I have to keep in mind that 8:00 in my timezone might be 3:00 in someone else's timezone, but once I do the simple math of adding the offsets and doing any necessary modulos, I now know that the meeting time I've chosen almost certainly isn't a reasonable meeting time for that person. I know from experience that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world, 3:00 is still probably sleeping time, regardless of what timezone that 3:00 is in. 3:00 in UTC is sleeping time in London, 3:00 in UTC-5 is sleeping time in Atlanta, 3:00 in UTC+9 is sleeping time in Tokyo -- in any case, 3:00 is sleeping time. Attempts to have "one world timezone", even leaving out the existence of fractional-hour timezone offsets, will always throw away that semantic detail about human schedules. For example, let's say you just enforce that everyone uses UTC. Congratulations, you no longer have to do offset math. Except that you have no idea if 10:00 is a reasonable meeting time for anyone within a few timezones of you (which remember, no longer exist, so you can't really use them as references). You no longer have to memorize each participant's offsets, but now you have to memorize the daylight hours for each participant instead, and that's arguably harder (X's daylight hours are 8:00->16:00, but Y's daylight hours are 14:00->2:00, but then Z's daylight hours are 12:30->20:30). Yes, there are companies with overseas contracts who dedicate some staff to working the same hours as their overseas counterparts. Do we really want that to become the global norm, though? Because if not, then "daylight hours" remains an important concept, and it's already baked semantically into the system of timezones we have today, more simply than the alternative. So if we toss out the piece of information that conveys the detail about "daylight hours" (which is what this clock does with its letters-instead-of-hours), then we're losing that information, and making it much easier to trample all over somebody's reasonable working schedule.
- asguy 5y agoThis clock smells like Esperanto.
- mbfg 5y agoi have no idea what's going on.
- capableweb 5y agoIn the bottom right it says "patent pending", does this mean you'll request payments for anyone using this in their own product? If so, it'll have no way of surviving when there are standarized, free datetime implementations/theories to use.
- hhebbo 5y agoNot for using the clock no, charging people for reading time would be ridiculous :) The clock is only the first step to simplify time zone thinking. If people like to use this, I do have plenty of ideas on what to build on top of this.
- capableweb 5y ago> Not for using the clock no, charging people for reading time would be ridiculous Agree, what about the other tools on the website, that is using the new time format you've created, are they within the patent too? It's really unclear what the patent is covering, and unfortunately your comment didn't help.
- hhebbo 5y agoSorry I can't disclose what the patent is covering for now, but I can say it's mainly about the IP. Are you planning to use hTime? I'm happy to chat about it if you like to.
- capableweb 5y agoYes, I'm working with multiple organizations that are suffering from the problem it aims to solve, but the vagueness of the patent and lack of transparency would make it very hard to even start talking about it.
- jachee 5y agoI’m pretty sure that having “Accept and close” or “contact us to manage your cookie settings” as the only cookie options isn’t compliant. It’s also an annoying dark pattern.
- karmakaze 5y agoIt's already broken idea. What good is a global time system that can't even know what day they're talking about. Monday Q:45? One location can say Q:45 that matches another's Q:45 but if they're talking about a Q:45 several days out I can see people missing connections by 24h. I'll stick with UTC date+time.
- hhebbo 5y agoNice feedback! Well UTC date + time is the same here. It's then date + hTime ;) The need to add date is there anyway.
- karmakaze 5y agoThe problem with date + hTime is that it doesn't have a well defined midnight. Where each 'actual timezone' crosses into the next hTime day is at a different hTime letter. How confusing!
- slownews45 5y agoI love this - great idea! Portrait mode on chrome / desktop is broken pretty badly. Patent pending - what does this mean?
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks! Yes I got the feedback on the responsiveness. I'll work on fixing thats.
- vzaliva 5y agoIt is weird to me to see 24 on a watch face. I know some countries use it but I for me after 23:59 comes 00:00 not 24:00.
- njt 5y agoI wrote a console based tool based on a similar idea, it shows city-based timezones: https://zeitzono.org/ https://zeitzono.org/ Unlike hTime, Zeitzono (currently) doesn't offer any meeting suggestion times, it's up to you to figure out when to schedule. That problem turned out to be kinda hard when more than a few cities are taken into consideration, so I never really added it in. (You do get to shift the clock to find the best time though.) All in all a nice tool. My only suggestion would be maybe to add some more cities to search. I couldn't find some that I tried. Otherwise people have to mentally shift to the closet big city/state (e.g. Gainesville, FL, US -> Orlando/Tampa/Jacksonville), which may be a problem if you are not familiar with the area. Also, it may be nice to add some aliases (eg. Bombay for Mumbai), because some places still go by their older names and not everyone has switched to the newer official name.
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks! What cities did you try? I'm happy to add them. And cool idea about the aliases, if you could give me some, I'll add them too.
- njt 5y agoGeoNames (http://www.geonames.org/ http://www.geonames.org/) offers a downloadable database of cities with more than 15k population and their time zones. They list aliases as well. That's what Zeitzono uses. Just use that. (You don't have to use all the listed cities if it slows down the hTime web app, just pick some minimum population threshhold (eg. every city larger than 100k people) and use those.)
- prewett 5y agoUI feedback: when selecting time zones to coordinate for a meeting, having a huge list to select from is such a pain that I would use some other tool just for that reason. Some of the common zones for an English-language tool are way at the bottom (USA, UK), and the USA ones aren't alphabetized. Also, there's no consistency with the naming: some are US states, others are cities, and I couldn't find some major cities, like San Francisco. Just a list of time zones would be a lot easier. And even easier would be a world map that I can click on that would highlight the selected zones.
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks for the feedback! As for the list of cities, I'll work on simplifying that somehow. The map idea is pretty cool, it'll take a bit longer to implement. I'll be working on that soon. San Francisco definitely exists in the list, I'm not sure why it doesn't show up on your side. Here is an example https://thehtime.com/intersect?locations=USA+-+San+Francisco%2CUSA+-+New+York%2CUK+-+London%2CGermany+-+Berlin https://thehtime.com/intersect?locations=USA+-+San+Francisco... Please let me know if it works.
- martinflack 5y agoSkip I and O on the letters, and go up to Z. Then the letter component will not be mistaken for a numeric digit.
- hhebbo 5y agoDone! Thanks for the feedback! This makes sense, I've received this feedback several times today. Would you like to give hTime a go and test it for some days? I'd love to hear some more feedback.
- pmarreck 5y agoI like the idea of galactic/orbital time, to coordinate between planets You just opened up Pandora's Box though... there are so many corner cases
- hhebbo 5y agoThanks, orbital time isn't final yet. Those are the initial thoughts to solve it. The approach of using the Sun's location might work. Yes, many corner cases, but somebody has got to solve them, this is the start.
- dmd 5y agoHere we go again. https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/abolish https://qntm.org/calendar https://qntm.org/calendar
- hhebbo 5y agoThe idea is not to abolish time zones, the idea is to add UTC to the clock so we have local times (time zones) and a global time (UTC) in one clock. With added features like "Meeting Time", we can defiantly find the best time to call and making sure it's not 4am in the other place.