
When To Chat: Reconcile Time Zone Differences - nwillson
https://whentochat.co/
======
tezza
This 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)

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madeofpalk
I really like [https://everytimezone.com](https://everytimezone.com)

It's what I've been using for years.

~~~
RichardCA
It'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.

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oefrha
I 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
Weird.. It even found my hometown, which is a random town of 15k people in
Germany.

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oefrha
That’s because it’s much less likely to have restaurants named after a random
town than Beijing or Seoul.

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kareemm
I’ve used [https://worldtimebuddy.com](https://worldtimebuddy.com) for this
purpose for years.

~~~
diggan
Same 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.

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dpix
Seems 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

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Tepix
Nice 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.

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gingericha
Had a similar issue, I had to hit the 12/24 hour button to get the table to
update.

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gingericha
For 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))

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michaelmior
Doesn'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/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/usage)

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dicytea
Any way to just input GMT/UTC timezones directly? Seems more practical that
way.

~~~
Timpy
I 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
Well 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.

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magicalhippo
Reminds 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.

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thunderbong
I like this one -

[https://everytimezone.com](https://everytimezone.com)

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ciroduran
Great 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.

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moritonal
I wrote a similar PWA site when I was doing long distance with my now wife!
[https://canicall.info/](https://canicall.info/)

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saurik
The 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
I 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.

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gshakir
There 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
…

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…

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rpncreator
Google 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)

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swinglock
My home and my office are not on different continents, so I'm not sure why
this is handy of WFH specifically. :)

~~~
tellarin
Mine sometimes are. ;)

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thih9
Feature request: support for multiple cities, could be handy for scheduling
group calls in distributed teams.

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skrebbel
Nice idea! Bonus points for the 24h toggle.

Note: It doesn't work in Edge. I select places and times and nothing happens.

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blauditore
For 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)

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aspaceman
This 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.

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thking
Meeting planner for multiple locations:
[https://www.worldtimeserver.com/meeting-
planner.aspx](https://www.worldtimeserver.com/meeting-planner.aspx)

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contingencies
Google _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).

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dveeden2
This 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
I 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_Irelan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_the_Republic_of_Ireland)

>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
You should look up Nepal if you want to be really ticked off.

~~~
netsharc
How about Higgins time...

[https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-August/026774.html](https://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2018-August/026774.html)

I'd link to JWZ's blog where I read about this, but he blocks HN referrals.

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mitul_45
Wow, 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.

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service_bus
Also 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.

~~~
DonHopkins
Would it be more space efficient to just add more hands to the same clock
face?

~~~
banana_giraffe
Can 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
When 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/...](https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-
tape/utilities/clocks/glass/)

    
    
        %    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!

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dbg31415
I've always liked the design of this one.

[https://everytimezone.com/](https://everytimezone.com/)

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throwaway413
Nice tool.

I personally use [https://spacetime.am](https://spacetime.am) (no affiliation,
just like it).

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wfh_man
My company seems to block this website so now I'll never know when to chat.

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jopsen
Love it!

Had been needing this forever... I used to use time.is, but this is _decent_
:)

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BurningFrog
As I keep saying, we'll all move to UTC in 1-3 decades.

~~~
tacomonstrous
How is that going to help anything? This is an issue with human circadian
rhythms, not with conventions of keeping time.

~~~
BurningFrog
It helps with agreeing to do something together online at a certain time.
Including announcing online events.

Nothing else. But that's enough.

~~~
netsharc
"Let's set the meeting at 16:00 [UTC is implied]."

"Sorry Bob, we in Sydney will be asleep at that time."

~~~
BurningFrog
You probably meant that as a counterargument, but to me it shows how simple
UTC makes things.

~~~
netsharc
I 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...

~~~
BurningFrog
Yeah. We have no disagreements about that.

> _If I use UTC, I still have to know what time (in UTC) the New Yorkers wake
> up..._

This is also true under the current system.

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nwillson
Thanks for the feedback everyone.

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notananthem
This website doesn't work at all in chrome

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rbosinger
Great little tool. I love the retro design too.

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HFrank
Tried in Safari and Chrome. Doesn't work.

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pachico
Didn't work for Barcelona

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cajuncanuck
Nice tool!

Better guy that wrote it!

