Visualizing Time Zones

by vijaydev • 16 years ago

63 29 16 years ago

terhechte• 16 years ago

I've had just that 'time zone math' problem for years, which is, why I wrote a small iPhone App just for the purpose of being able to easily lookup this information when on the road. Globetrotter :) http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/globetrotter-timezone-calcula...

everytimezone.com looks swell though. Love it.

mullr• 16 years ago

This is so close to being really cool. Usually what's needed, though, is to compare two or three time zones text to each other. In this system, they're far away so that's hard to do.

duck• 16 years ago

Yeah, cool to look at... but not as useful as this one: http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/ (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133613)

timhastings• 16 years ago

I agree. Really useful. Picking just the timezones you are interested in would make it perfect for the job. Great work!

stravid• 16 years ago

I don't know if they will implement something like that, but they are definitly still working on it!

mojuba• 16 years ago

Beautiful, well executed. To make it even more useful I think it would be cool

* to provide selection of countries to be included in the graph, because what matters is usually two or more countries, say, participating in a conference call

* to have another sliding bar that can be adjusted manually, e.g., to find a point in time most suitable for all participants of a conference call

mhansen• 16 years ago

Broken on both the latest Firefox and dev build of Chrome on Ubuntu.

frederickcook• 16 years ago

Only a black page for both my Mac Chrome 4.0.249.30 and Safari 4.0.3, but works on my Firefox 3.6.3 (OS X 10.6.2).

frou_dh2• 16 years ago

For me it is fancy and graphical on Mac/Safari-Latest and all-text on Win/Firefox-Latest.

theycallmemorty• 16 years ago

My only complaint is that once I grabbed the bar and dragged it around I had a hard time getting it back to the current time without refreshing the page.

frou_dh2• 16 years ago

Anecdotal: The last time I needed to figure out was what someone meant by American PST - this wouldn't have helped me.

Great design.

pieter• 16 years ago

Looks very nice. The only problem I had is that it's not clear when you load the page that you can actually interact with it. Some people might go away confused and think this tool can't convert specific times

bdotdub2• 16 years ago

A couple of days ago it just followed your mouse wherever it went so you didn't need to drag anything. I think I prefer that than what the interaction is now

kasterma• 16 years ago

Site does not work for me, but I have been using foxclocks for a long time:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1117

snitko• 16 years ago

Maybe I'm just retarded, but I spent 1 minute on this website and couldn't figure out how to use it. Too many elements jumping and shining blew my mind. What I really want is two text fields, where I can type in cities and get the difference and local time in each of those cities. That's it. My guess is that people really like the design, but I can't see how this is more convenient than typing "time in San-Francisco" in Google.

ahoyhere2• 16 years ago

You're clearly not the intended audience. :)

CGamesPlay• 16 years ago

This is very cool, but can you add a field to manually select a date in a particular time zone, as well as a current time button?

bdotdub2• 16 years ago

Always funny to me to see people not realizing the author is not always the submitter

audionerd• 16 years ago

Reminds me of Bret Victor's BART train schedule redesign: http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#case_study_train_schedules

wallflower• 16 years ago

Beautiful. Thank you for posting that as I doubt I would have come across that. As someone who rides public transit 5 or more days a week, that is a very useful visualization.

Ionic_Walrus2• 16 years ago

its awesome and super easy!, it took me exactly 30 seconds to figure out that I can move the slider. Pls don't listen to the old farts here who say that the site is "shiny" or "Can't figure out".

mcantor• 16 years ago

Because old farts never need to compare time zones...?

Ionic_Walrus2• 16 years ago

You can find tons of web-apps/apps that show the timezone(s) in a traditional form, but this one has a different take on presenting the same data. Why change the one unique feature ?

sxtxixtxcxh• 16 years ago

I'm assuming the green timezone is your current timezone? Perhaps that could be spelled out somewhere.

mattparcher• 16 years ago

I'm not the author, but it appears that the green tag is your current time zone, at the time you want to convert from. Initially, this starts as the current time, but it can be adjusted. When you move the green tag, a purple tag is placed to represent the current time instead.

bmelton• 16 years ago

Doesn't work in IE7 I guess? All I see is a green bar that isn't draggable. I already noted in the comments that the UI isn't necessarily obvious, but I've tried pushing, pulling, dragging every visible element on the page, and haven't seen anything happen.

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

I'm using Chrome on Windows (don't ask) and I get a featureless black screen. What am I supposed to see?

aidenn0• 16 years ago

I don't get it. I can slide the local time around, and right next to the bar it shows the time in each timezone, and there's a bunch of grey bubbles that move around. Is it just that it's broken on chrome?

[edit]I tried it in opera 10.5 and firefox 3.5 and it was worse than in chrome, what browser does it work in?

ahoyhere2• 16 years ago

Ha! I didn't even notice this got submitted here.

Background, for the record:

1. It is alpha alpha ALPHA.

2. We built it for the iPad specifically, and Safari/Webkit generally.

3. It has no images. All webkit-specific CSS. All those gorgeous gradients! I gave Thomas and a PSD and he made the magic happen.

4. It has no JavaScript framework.

5. It gzips down to under 3K.

This evening Thomas added Firefox support. Naturally, Firefox's CSS styles for gradients are not as nice (and, naturally, different syntax) than the Webkit ones.

We plan to do more things with it. This was really a proof of concept. I was surprised it got such wide circulation already...

... although considering the alternative "tools" in this space, I guess I shouldn't be.

Thanks guys!

Visualizing Time Zones

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