
Ridiculously easy world times and meetings across time zones - jemeshsu
http://www.worldtimebuddy.com/
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sivers
Suggestion: add the states and provinces of the world as if they are cities.

Sometimes you know the person you're scheduling is in California/US,
Alberta/Canada, or Bahia/Brazil. But since those are not cities they're not
coming up in your location search.

~~~
danohuiginn
also, add GMT. Currently, I get 'no matches found' from putting GMT into the
search box!

~~~
mseebach
Careful! GMT != the time in London, as many people tend to assume. Britain is
currently on BST (British Summer Time) which is GMT+1.

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StavrosK
This. Almost nobody needs GMT, so it would be better if it was left out, to
avoid confusion. I can't tell you how many times people showed up in meetings
an hour earlier because they said "GMT" and meant "BST".

~~~
Arubis
Believe it or not, West Africa exists.

Perhaps a better indicator would be regional, ie. Casablanca/Dakar (+0h).

edit: reply below (correctly) points out that Casablanca is on WET. go figure.

~~~
mseebach
The _only_ reliable indicator of offset is political geographical features.
This would also keep you from making the exact error that the parent pointed
out, as Casablanca is observing summertime and is thus currently in GMT+1.

As far as I can tell, the only territory currently at GMT+0 is Cape Verde,
which I would think it's fair to classify as "almost no-one".

~~~
cashman
Reykjavik, Iceland, is always at GMT+0 and has no DST.
<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=211>

(That doesn't really contradict "almost no-one", of course.)

~~~
mseebach
So according to

[http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/e...](http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/eu/gmt.html)

[http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/a...](http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/africa/gmt.html)

a comprehensive list of territories observing GMT all year:

    
    
        * Iceland
        * Burkina Faso
        * Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
        * Gambia
        * Ghana
        * Guinea-Bissau
        * Guinea
        * Liberia
        * Mali
        * Mauritania
        * Saint Helena
        * Sao Tome and Principe
        * Senegal
        * Sierra Leone
        * Togo

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djsla
Just came back from a concert to x10 traffic on world time buddy, which tracks
back straight to here :)

Really glad to see a lot of positive feedback - thanks guys! The UX indeed
took a long time to get right (?), with multiple (failed) versions over a
couple of years. Simple things are hard to make.

Love the suggestions/ideas as well. Will consider for upcoming features.

Can folks elaborate what they mean by "slow". Feel free to do so in private,
over email -- contact@worldtimebuddy.com

P.S. Why didn't I think of posting here myself? :)

~~~
felipe
It takes 5+ seconds to auto-complete the city, and then 10+ seconds to reload
the page after I click on the city. That's pretty slow in my opinion.

BTW, that's a great UI, much better than timeanddate.com (which I normally
use)

~~~
djsla
Thanks felipe,

I can repro this quire regularly now. Will look into the right way to fix.

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divtxt
Nice!

I've thought about a vertical UI like this for the last 2 years but was never
happy with the html mockups (my last mockup: <http://www.txtlabs.com/tzs/>),
so I know this UI is hard to get right.

Suggestions:

\- simple buttons for next/previous day & today

\- make date boundaries more prominent

\- speed - do everything in JavaScript - site should become purely static as a
nice bonus

\- drop-down of ordered timezones as an alternative entry option

Question for HN: how would you monetize a simple site this? ads? or not at
all?

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weezer
Take a look at <http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com> I think the interface is
a bit cleaner, plus they include states and countries as well as cities. This
site is also the result of HN's weekend challenge.

Here's the author's experiences <http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/weekend-
challenge.html>

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udp
I'm just getting a page saying "This Account Has Been Suspended"

~~~
ljf
Guess they went over their bandwidth allowance! I think making the front page
of HN is a bit like getting slashdotted was a few years back!

~~~
djsla
It's HN + LifeHacker.

Working with hosting company to resolve...

~~~
alanthonyc
Who's your host? You need to tell them to have a better message to display.
This one makes it sound like you're some kind of criminal.

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piramida
it's the default message from cpanel which makes it look like you use some
very bad hosting :)

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djsla
Finding good hosting is a challenge :) Any recommendations on an affordable
hosting (PHP/MySQL) that can easily scale with traffic and takes care of
server maintenance/patching?

Thnx!

P.S. The situation is resolved for now.

P.P.S. We've got so much great feedback here and via our site that it'll take
some time to go through it all and get back to folks. Thank you!

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Cherian
<http://everytimezone.com/> from Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy is my choice. But I
am willing to switch if you give me a rest URL for custom time.

~~~
richardw
It looks pretty slick but interestingly WorldTimeBuddy was easier for me to
understand immediately (having never seen either before).

WorldTimeBuddy doesn't take any effort to see what the time in each zone is,
for any time in the next few hours. I also default to thinking in hours (not
minutes) for these, which WTB presents by default, but with EveryTimeZone
almost all clicked positions have to be adjusted to get an on-the-hour line. I
can't really figure out how to add my city (or if it's possible). So, personal
view - ETZ shows a lot of 'cool stuff' but doesn't really solve my problem as
well as WTB.

Again, not related to either project, YMMV, etc.

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onwardly
Nice! I love this! Integrate Google calendar and I'm thrilled.

Another suggestion: make the available hours darker and the night hours
lighter. My eyes were drawn to the dark spaces, and it was easier to visualize
the overlaps when I was looking at the dark spaces.

~~~
morganpyne
I agree that the current colour scheme makes the night time hours stand out
more than the daylight ones, but I would suggest perhaps a different approach
- darken the background so that the daylight hours have more contrast and the
night hours blend in more. This would solve the problem of your eyes being
drawn to the darker spaces while still keeping the more expected display of
daylight hours having light colours and night hours being darker.

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ericmoritz
I've been using everytimezone.com for this kind of thing.

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darklajid
Okay, admit it: Who else thought 'Nice, but does it break down for non-integer
timezone offsets'?

Added 'Adelaide, Australia'. Obviously the creator of this neat site was way
ahead of me though. Really, really helpful, thanks!

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pkarbe
Awesome! Here is what I would do next:

You've got a great visualization concept of time zone scheduling, which is
worth a lot. But the UI alone as a stand-alone web app is easy to replicate
and not very sticky. As a next step I would build a plugin for Google Calendar
and Outlook using the same data visualization concept. This would help users
figure out which times to suggest for a call with someone in a different time
zone, and they would be able to generate an invite right from the plugin. Then
I would introduce scheduling interaction between users through the plugin. For
example if user A uses the plugin to suggest a time for a call with person B
in a different time zone, person B would benefit immensely if he/she could not
only accept/decline but also see what other times are available purely from a
time zone perspective (ideally also taking into account other appointments
that user A has). This would increase stickiness and virality while also
allowing you to establish a business. Not sure yet whether contextual
advertising using call subjects or a subscription model would work better.

Come to think of it, this is all pretty trivial but I had fun thinking about
it. Good luck!

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Killah911
Hmmm, may be worth mentioning something about scalability and reliability. I
just got an "account suspended" page after clicking on the link :(

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aymeric
My startup developed something similar that persists your choices in a cookie:
<http://taskarmy.com/remote_team_work_hours>

The scenario I had in mind was when you work in a remote team and you want to
know if you can chat with them or expect an answer soon.

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tuhin
Love this so much. Please add a Mac OS widget and iCal/Google Cal support.
Something like Rapportive raplet maybe. I know this is wishful thinking but I
actually think this will be useful to a whole lot of people.

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telemachos
I use this - <http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedform.html> \- not
especially pretty but it gets the job done well.

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ryancarson
Holy heck. I love this! Living in the UK, but constantly organizing meetings
(Skype, etc) in the States will mean this is a super-useful tool :)

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Klinky
So let's say this takes off and becomes really popular. What is the
monetization strategy for something like this? Or is there one?

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helipad
What are you using to determine user location?

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kennethologist
This is a really good app. I talk and do business with clients & contractors
in California, Romania, India and Philippines and it is often very difficult
to schedules meetings that are reasonable for myself and the other party.

Thanks for this! Good UI good performance. Good inspiration!

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kopos
For the first time coordinating across timezones is so darn simple. Thank you
for this.

\- Day / date boundaries can be more intuitive \- Day and night too

Can you tie this up with skype (as a small quick plugin), Google Calendar and
MS Outlook?

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dmoney
It would be useful to be able to display 24-hour time for a given row.

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adlep
Great idea. My business partner is in HK, China. Another in Germany. I am in
the US. This will come in very handy to coordinate meetings between us

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rrikhy
Great for enterprise but it needs a different name. Probably an outlook invite
for the time after setting all the parameters would be ideal.

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basseq
Bookmarked; we'll how if it gets used in daily life, but it's certainly better
than the tool I have been using. Seems slow, currently.

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Aidan
Much easier than <http://whenthetimeis.com/>, well done on the interface!

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mike_esspe
Should have UTC+0. Couldn't find Greenwich.

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mwilcox
I was just thinking the other day that someone should make something like
this. Thanks, bookmarked :)

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bconway
"This Account Has Been Suspended"?

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jconnop
Much faster than using worldtimeserver.com as I used to. Bookmarked :)

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antirez
This is completely awesome, very useful for me, thank you.

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robot
Site name too long, hard to remember.

When you type cities, you get detailed, irrelevant city names, e.g. type
london you get all sorts of london, we know I don't mean Londonderry County
Borough, UK

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barmstrong
Something about this reminds me of Hipmunk.

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kn0thing
Thanks! I was really impressed with this as soon as I saw it.

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forensic
newfoundland doesn't work

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lell
It's true, Newfoundland is a good corner case for this app. 1) It has its own
timezone which involves a half hour offset, (called NT) which is UTC−3:30 and
2) its capital is St. John's. This city name is common in the maritime
provinces and the rest of Canada: there's also one in Winnipeg, PEI, Quebec,
and New Brunswick.

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edderly
Great, but slow!

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alexkay
Consider adding an option for the 24-hour clock, that's what most people use.

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rmc
Subjective. Many people use 12 hour clock when scheduling things,

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gladimdim2
thank you. great idea and realization.

