Show HN: Pole Clock, a single 24h clock with multiple timezones
I designed this Pole Clock to be a helpful tool for people like myself who often struggle with managing their sense of time.
I found that analog clocks are generally easier to read and understand than digital ones, however I find the fact that every day is broken into two 12-hour rotations unintuitive. A single 24-hour rotation makes it easier to grasp where in the day you are, the bottom half representing night and the top half representing day.
Additionally, because the clock displays 24 hours, you can add extra hour hands on the clock for other time zones. This is especially useful if you work remotely or have friends and colleagues in different time zones. At a single glance, see where they are in their days and energy levels!
I hope you'll give the Pole Clock a try and find that it helps you better understand and manage your sense of time.
2022 was not such a year; there appears to be a bug here.
Time zones are ridiculous, eh?
You can change between AM/PM and 24h in the 'Configure Timezones' menu!
I see there's a Statue of Liberty icon for NY, it'd be nice to have icons for other cities :).
also quite odd default choice of cities, so I have own European city, London, then 3 East Asia cities and 2 US cities with nothing between central Europe and Thailand, no middle east, no India
it would be also better if every other hour would be bigger so it's easier to figure out minutes, with all of them having same size it's confusing and more difficult to read as if they had highlighted positions of original hours
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicule
An interesting thing could be if the small hands had a color that indicates the night/day/dusk/dawn
My point is that CET feels rather wide to me, so I guess substitute for Sevilla or Madrid
See also: “Falsehoods programmers believe about time”
https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right
When I add time zones with fractional-hour offsets, the hour hand for those zones is at the appropriate angle within the indicated hour.
1. Could there be an option to place 00:00 at the top instead of the bottom? It looks like both positions have been used for analog 24 hour clocks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial
2. Could there be an option to set the background to be a polar-projected world map (e.g. United Nations emblem) that rotates to align with the turning of the hour hands?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projecti...
But unfortunately they have noon at the top.
I wear a 24 hour analogue dial wrist watch, with 24 on top. I'll admit, I sometimes wish I had chosen 12 on top, since it's more naturally to look at the watch during the day, and less so during the night. Since it more naturally follows - on quick visual inspection - what it would look like on a normal 12 hour analogue dial.
Mine is specifically from the Military Time Collection, called Military Dress, I believe.[1] Unfortunately, the specific model appeared to be sold out right now.
0 - https://www.aaawatchclub.com/
1 - https://www.aaawatchclub.com/military-time-watches_5to6.html...
Rateka also makes a well-regarded 24 hour dial.
Both easily available for €100 or so, though only the vostoks are automatic.
Would also love to see an option to highlight working hours (9am to 5pm?). Those are important markers for most individuals.
2359
2400
2401
And on to 2459, 2500, 2501 etc.
(At least they used to before 24 hour running, not sure about now)
I forget the reasoning, but I remember it being described to me as both necessary and a reasonably common construct.
One advantage of using 24 instead of 0 is it makes it immediately obvious that this is a 24 hour clock. Otherwise you have to read the 0, see the 23 next to it, and infer that it's 24 hours, which takes a moment if you are not expecting it.
As cool as this pole clock is, it's not as useful to my mind as the more linear representation worldtimebuddy.com uses.
* https://romeoswatches.com/the-5-best-24-hours-watches-buying...
* https://svalbard.watch/pages/Svalbard_24-hour_watches.html
* https://vintagewatchinc.com/24-hour-watch/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial#Watches
I hope I can get Pole Clock on Apple Watch, wish they allowed custom watch faces!
Seriously? Apple does not allow this?
[1] Activity Digital, Solar Graph, Modular, Infograph, Modular Compact, Liquid Metal, Solar Dial, Unity Lights, Gradient, Pride Woven, World Time, Pride Threads.
[2] https://imgur.com/a/A9u4EYr
He got me one when I moved out, and I've had it ever since. For some time it was actually hard for me to tell time looking at a normal analog clock.
Nothing comes close to the convenience of an Apple Watch.
First, you can add custom cities to your Apple Watch, so you can see the time in e.g. Dortmund (which has my relative) as opposed to Frankfurt (which is a big city that happens to define the time zone but has no relatives). With mechanical watches, you are limited to a selection of cities that might or might not be relevant to you.
Second, the DST renders any mechanical watch incorrect for at least half a year. One of my relatives is in Brazil, where they have DST in their summer (Dec-Feb), so mechanical watches are incorrect for almost a year (except for a couple of weeks around the DST shift). Again, Moscow has moved permanently to summer time. Apple Watch has all this covered.
Third, most GMT watches with 24-hour hand have a "night/day" bezel (black-grey aka "Batman", or blue-red aka "Pepsi"), but they all separate 24 hours into a 12-hour period of "day" (6am-6pm) and "night" (6pm-6am). Apple Watch shows the actual daylight and night time at any day of the week (so the "bezel" is split unevenly).
Mechanical watches are good at many things but being able to reliably track several DST-observing timezones is not one of them. In this, nothing even comes close to the convenience of an Apple Watch.
I think that would be the main draw of a single hand watch for me.
Has one retailer in Germany and another in Italy.
It reminds me of the Botta Design Uno 24: https://www.botta-design.de/en/products/uno-24-plus-titan
I appreciate the clear delineation between "day" and "night" sides of the face, the meaningful position of the date complication, and a hour hand design that makes it possible to see down to ~5m increments.
They use an LCD backdrop behind the physical hour hand to show exactly when sunrise and sunset is for today, rather than a fixed 6-6 shadow. Really nice idea.
Please consider adding a custom watch face to the Coros watches such as the Vertix.
Also consider that there are timezones offset by 30 mins.
The Statue of Liberty glyph for NYC is extremely difficult to make out (on mobile, at any rate). I would much prefer NYC. Also not sure why NYC has to be special, I would have thought UTC would the special one.
Hope you are well my friend. I smiled at this project and then saw it was made by you — it’s such a beautiful project that only you could have made :).
Great idea and execution.
The "bottom half" should be dynamic based on current sunrise/sunset data.
Better yet, let me decide my own waking hours and put that bit on the bottom.
Might as well make the favicon dynamic as well.
- Let users switch the primary time zone by clicking/tapping on an hour hand.
- Display the true day/night line for the current time zone.
- Visualize the different dates (angle between the date line and 24 hours). Maybe color the hour hands differently when he date differs.
Feature requests if i may pls ! 1) Adjust the time with a slider or dial 2) Put the second hand outside the dial 3) Same for min hand or show hide the min hand -Merci!
For instance, I can't tell if Tokyo has the same date as NYC or not.
If it's 7:30am now for Tokyo and NYC is showing 5:30pm, we know that Tokyo is obviously a day ahead.
For my own purposes I would like to see accurate day/night line that moves with the map.
One thing that would be handy would be to encode the settings in the URL. Then people can share a link to this with others who need the same set of time zones (eg, colleagues) and have the time zones already be set up.
https://fildon.me/time-after-time/
Notably, after the initial page load I don't use any JS to update the hand positions. It's entirely static SVG elements.
Broadcast radio people are _obsessed_ with sweep second hands, since it's how they all learned to time their announcements to end right as the next program segment begins.
If you sold a cheap tablet that did nothing but that, and synced to NTP with a programmable display offset (some stations run 5 seconds ahead of real time to deal with encoder delay, for instance), station managers would beat a path to your door.
I would love if it had markings for minutes/seconds.
With the 12 hour clock each hour marking corresponds to an integer amount of minutes or seconds (e.g. the marking "1" is 5 seconds/minutes, "2" is 10 seconds/minutes etc)
But with a 24 hours one, this happens only every 2 hours ("13" is halfway between 2 and 3 seconds/minutes, "14" is 5 seconds/minutes) so I'm finding it hard to read minutes and seconds.
https://sunclock.net/
It's completely free if anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cityzen/hfdldnggnf...
https://i.imgur.com/vjWs8mr.png
Suggestion: