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Show HN: Pole Clock, a single 24h clock with multiple timezones (poleclock.com)
440 points by PascalPixel on Dec 31, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 165 comments
Hi HN! 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.




Two ideas to consider adding to this cool concept:

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...


Another consideration might be to switch 24 to 0 or 00. I've seen a lot of 24 hour clocks that use 24 and I'm not sure why this ever happened since there is no time in hour 24. 12:15 AM/PM is a real thing for a 12-hour clock, but 24:15 isn't, as far as I'm aware. Unless some people consider that to be the very first hour of the day, but that seems like it would invite more confusion.


Tangently related, but working timetables on the London Underground run to 2330, 2345, 2359, but then rather than going to 0000, because the post midnight services (until about 0400) are on the previous date, they then go

2359

2400

2401

And on to 2459, 2500, 2501 etc.

(At least they used to before 24 hour running, not sure about now)


I saw this often in open/close times on bars in Japan in my trip there a couple weeks ago. I saw as high as 28:00


23:59, 1:00:00, 1:00:01 would have been better.


The latter two could be confused with hour:minute:second


24:00 is a real time. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#Midnight_00:00_a...

> there is no time in hour 24

Doesn't matter. 24 marks the end of the day.

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.


I used to work with a delivery route planning system that had 24:00 as midnight on one day, and 00:00 was midnight on the following day — the same “instant” but on two different days.

I forget the reasoning, but I remember it being described to me as both necessary and a reasonably common construct.


I've just added a setting for midnight to be 0 instead of 24, have a look


> 1. Could there be an option to place 00:00 at the top instead of the bottom?

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.


There are quite of a few of those about, I have a Vostok 24 hour watch and it's a nice conversational piece.

Rateka also makes a well-regarded 24 hour dial.

Both easily available for €100 or so, though only the vostoks are automatic.


Sounds cool, would you care to link the make/model?


It was the only distributor of 24 hour analogue wrist watches I could find, where the prices were reasonable, is called AAA Watch Club.[0]

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...


Thanks


Great ideas! I've added both! Find them in Settings! Enjoy!


Seems that the World Map is "fixed" and does not rotate to keep it aligned with the hands (expectation is that New York hand should roughly point to New York on the map)?


It rotates on my machine... :(


Could you add the share link? So that if I share the URL with a friend or family,they get exactly my configuration of cities from URL. Maybe the cities can be embedded in URL as GET parameters.


I can add it for sure! It's just a bit more technically involved so maybe next year!


The minute-hand seems to be buggy. It seems to take its 0 as top even though the 0 for hours is at bottom. So when I choose midnight-on-top option, it flips and 00:45 time shows the minute-hand in due-east which is completely wrong.

Would also love to see an option to highlight working hours (9am to 5pm?). Those are important markers for most individuals.


For the second one, that is what is done by this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1335/

But unfortunately they have noon at the top.


Huh, I built a 24 hour clock as part of this mini project:

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.


Oooooooooo, sweep second hands.

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.


Love the face that includes 7 days! Very minimalistic!


If anyone wants to wear a 24-hour dial on their wrist:

* 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


Wowzers I love these one-hand 'slow' watches! https://svalbard.watch/pages/Svalbard_24-hour_watches.html

I hope I can get Pole Clock on Apple Watch, wish they allowed custom watch faces!


Due to relatives scattered around the world, I track the time in several time zones for the last 20 years or so.

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.


Oh, those backward watches brings back memories. My dad used to have a big one in his bar, and as a prank tell customers looking at it that they're perhaps too drunk to get another drink.

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.


Just have a drink and it'll work fine!


> Apple Watch, wish they allowed custom watch faces!

Seriously? Apple does not allow this?


I guess it depends what you mean by "custom watch faces" but I've got 12[1] things that show different variations of clocks and widgets installed on my Watch and the Watch app offers a few more[2].

[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


All too complex, just want 24h analog :'(


They do not and I've been wanting a 24h analog dial on mine with nothing else for years... Pole Clock's timezone hour hands would be a bonus though!


It shouldn't be surprising, that's very typical of Apple.


There are two options - the Solar and World Time faces are 24h


I like the simplicity and design of the Slow (https://www.slow-watches.com) watches mentioned in the first list you link in your post.

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.


I like "Yes" watches: https://www.yeswatch.com

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.


And a good brand for single-hand watches: http://meistersinger.com/


I may have missed it, but it does not look like Meister Singer makes a version with a 24h dial, is that correct?

I think that would be the main draw of a single hand watch for me.


I'm liking the Svalbard ones, but can't find a European retailer?


https://svalbard.watch/pages/where_to_buy_Svalbard_watches.h...

Has one retailer in Germany and another in Italy.


Someone could create a Fitbit clock to do this too!


Or any GMT watch.


Shouldn't there be two minute hands if you add LA and India (PST and IST)? The minutes are offset by 30 mins in this scenario.


Came here looking for a comment suggesting these discrepancies. I was not disappointed.

See also: “Falsehoods programmers believe about time”

https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...


Hey meaniehead... I added offsets to the hour hands for +30 and +45 timezones!


Can anyone recommend a book that discusses in depth all the peculiarities of timekeeping, time zones, historical efforts for measuring time, etc.? I would love to read something like that and I feel that there are many stories to be told.


It’s a long post, not a book but still a great resource on this topic:

https://zachholman.com/talk/utc-is-enough-for-everyone-right


You can see this by the position of the hour hands. The minute hand is “just” a convenience.


Another one for Nepal, they have an offset of 45 mins.


It appears the minute hand only reflects local time.

When I add time zones with fractional-hour offsets, the hour hand for those zones is at the appropriate angle within the indicated hour.


Also, Newfoundland and Labrador (GMT -3:30)


And South Australia


It would be nice to have a permalink to a version with my customized list of time zones. I imagine it would be useful to send it for recurring meetings with the same set of persons.


I tend to use worldtimebuddy.com as a very practical way of representing timezones when scheduling things.

As cool as this pole clock is, it's not as useful to my mind as the more linear representation worldtimebuddy.com uses.


I think I used https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/ (or a very similar site) a few times, but the clock version looks more nice.


For this exact problem I build this Chrome extension (free) - have a new tab set for the timezones where you have co-workers. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cityzen/hfdldnggnf...


This would indeed be great to have... Then it's also easier to adopt the thing for team! Good idea!


Congratulations on this and pretty cool design. I just got the map:clock for ios which shows a map with different city times. One feature in that is to be able to do what if .. a slider to modify the times and see the time at different locations. A slider or rotary dial to change the times would be a good feature for planning. Bookmarked ur clock !

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!


Might do all these things!


I've learned far to often that the international date line is not just tinder for expats. Can you put something to indicate the date on the timezones. Something just like your day/night indicator which tells me that on one side of the line is December 31 2022 and on the other side is January 1 2023.


That's a good idea, I guess for now you're forced to add Tonga as a makeshift indicator! It's Tonga time!


First thing I did was add Newfoundland and nope, it doesn’t add another minute hand.

Time zones are ridiculous, eh?


Haha, yes! But Newfoundland's hour hand should be offset a little bit!


How about an option to show the digital clock on the hand. Engineer in me is not satisfied with lack of precision.


Ah yes that too. A classic edge case to add frustrating complexity to your implementation! :)


Always fun! It does the same for every other offset timezone, and seen from that timezone, everything else is slightly offset :)


Nice.

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.


I like it and am interested to see how this evolves. I would love it to replace the simple clock on my iPhone screen.

For my own purposes I would like to see accurate day/night line that moves with the map.


Me too! Issue is that different longitudes have different sunrise/sunset times, so I went with an arbitrary cut down the middle to get a rough idea of how people in other timezones are feeling right now (tired, close to dark, etc)


Sunrise/sunset times do vary with longitude (depending on how close you are to the centre of the timezone you 'should' be in, and also summer time), but the biggest variation is with latitude. Especially near the solstices like now.


Instead of dividing by two equal halves day and night, make this dependent on sunrise and sunset of the location, would be helpful to know at a glance the actual day hours and night hours


I built a clock that does just that. It also shows twilight times and the position and phase of the moon:

https://sunclock.net/


This is stunning. Thanks!


I’d love that this too. It’s one of the little details I’ve gone to appreciate about my Apple Watch, how all the day night features (at least seem to, I’ve not exhaustively debugged it) use correct day, night, twilight, etc, based on my current location.


A suggestion: support merging timezones into a single hand. Currently, if two timezones overlap, only the first TZ is shown. However, one might want two hands as the DST shifts may be different.


Great idea! I could combine the names on a single hand


So intuitive and simple, it's hard to imagine this representation of time zones hasn't been conceived of before. But perhaps that's the definition of "genius"...


T_T that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me


Congrats, this is so handy (pun intended)! :-)

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.


Really cool - would love to move the Tokyo time and see the other hands move in accordance, to see what 15 there is in my place


That's a great idea! I'll add that tomorrow!


It was a mindfuck to see AM/PM clock when the title read 24h.


I've changed it back to 24h by default just now

You can change between AM/PM and 24h in the 'Configure Timezones' menu!


Ah ! So, that's what ticked me off :D.


Oops! It's 24h again now!


Excellent. You can see at a glance which of the cities are in right now in day light and where's night.


Not precisely though since in different places, the sun goes up/under at different times.

An interesting thing could be if the small hands had a color that indicates the night/day/dusk/dawn


If you want a single-view visualisation of sunrise/sunset across the globe, there's always this design: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/sunearth.html


I've always found it quite weird (though obviously convenient) that Warsaw and Madrid are on the same time zone


They are not. It is 17:25 in Warsaw now, 16:25 in Dublin.


Oops, not sure what city I was thinking of when I wrote Dublin

My point is that CET feels rather wide to me, so I guess substitute for Sevilla or Madrid


Right? A 'good enough' solution / update to the regular clock, I felt! :)


I wish I could have this on my Apple Watch, but Apple does not allow us to make our own watch faces.


Same! All I want is this on my Apple Watch. Hey Apple; Call Me?


Three suggestions:

- 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.


Very nice. I've wanted something simple like this. I work with team distributed all over the globe and often end up googling "time in Minsk", for example. This is a really clever way of combining all the times into a single clock.


Glad it helps you!


Get it added to the collection at https://24hourtime.info/2022/07/13/the-sun-clock/


That's my clock!


Really cool idea.

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.


I think it's more like showing a cool feature than an actual case where it is super useful.


Aye! I had a user request flag emojis for countries, so I popped the statue of liberty in for NYC to show the feature of naming :)


Yeah me too struggled a lot to make out that it was the Statue of Liberty


+1, just use NYC please


This is cool. Possibly move the black hands to the back so they don't obscure timezones?

https://i.imgur.com/vjWs8mr.png


Looks a lot like the app World Clock Pro I’ve used for a while: https://worldclock.pro/mobile/


And that one seems to handle the minute hand question by omitting the minute hand altogether


I love the concept, dense information in a relatively small area.

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.


Very nice work! Couple months ago I built a Chrome extension solving the same problem but little bit differently. New tab displays the timezones + a nice picture and weather of the cities you choose.

It's completely free if anyone is interested: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cityzen/hfdldnggnf...


Here's my helpful little time thingy (not a live clock, but let's you set arbitrary dates): https://www.masswerk.at/time/convert/


This is wonderful!

Suggestion:

  - have an option to pick one TZ to
    be at the "12 o'clock" position
    (click on the hour hand of a TZ
    to rotate the whole clock so that
    TZ is a the top)
  
  - then a TZ is selected, show time
    deltas on the other TZs' hour hands
  
  - allow arbitrary rotations so one
    can place any particular hour at
    the "12 o'clock" position


Love this, PascalPixel!

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.


<3


How can I tell at a glance which timezones have the same date, and which ones are a day behind or ahead?

For instance, I can't tell if Tokyo has the same date as NYC or not.


The clock shows 24 hours, and we know that NYC always behind Tokyo; you can just tell this from the arms of the clock.

If it's 7:30am now for Tokyo and NYC is showing 5:30pm, we know that Tokyo is obviously a day ahead.


Of course, I can calculate. I am not interested in calculating. I am interested in the display just telling me.


The moment the date passed is midnight, the bottom of the clock, using your local hour hand it should be intuitive enough to see which timezones have passed that point, without calculation


Something similar (but simpler) I made for my personal use: https://rsapkf.org/tz


week of the year: 53/52 ... perhaps you meant it as a joke?


It’s possible (with the ISO week calendar) to have a week 53– on years where Jan 1 is on Thursday or Wednesday for leap years.

2022 was not such a year; there appears to be a bug here.


Slick design. Love that it doesn't try to do a million things. I think this would be really nice as a smartwatch face or an iPhone widget.


Yes. This is a very “Apple” design (and that is high praise).


Thank you!


Thank you!


Why not abbreviate New York as NY instead of New? Why also use a statue of liberty emoji for eastern standard time instead of EST or NY?


You can configure the name to display whatever you like :)


Actually, you can’t if you are in that time zone. If I have my local device in a different time zone, then yes, I can set the name.


Oh, right! I should actually just delete the display of the local time zone... done!


Why all the why questions?


This is neat. I was wondering if the world map in the background could be rotated so that the city/timezone hands could (roughly) point to their respective locations. For instance, if you had the NYC and LAX hands, then the North American continent could be positioned between them with the former to the right and the latter to the left.


It should be doing this at the moment unless there is some bug :(


But not all countries' local time differs from UTC by multiples of 60 minutes. See Iran.


This is great! Now I wish there was a wristwatch (Apple Watch face?) that could do this as well.


Cute ^^.

I see there's a Statue of Liberty icon for NY, it'd be nice to have icons for other cities :).


You can change it yourself in the settings


My OCD can't take the alignment of the second hand to the numbers.

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.


Sorry for giving you the jitters... :( I like the favicon idea I might do that!


You could make it lighter by removing even hour marks, like so https://codepen.io/kirillmyshkin/full/dyRQOda


Oh that's nice and light indeed!


Bug: All other cities use the Phrase I type in the box. I.E.for NYC, If I type JFK, it shows JFK on its hour hand. But the local time always shows LOS for me even if I type SFO. It should show SFO, as typed.


I've just removed the name on the local time hour hand entirely


the city with picture arm is not readable on mobile, you need to zoom to know the actual city, it would be better to just use name instead of such small picture

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


It's not very legible on a laptop either. Based on the orientation, I thought it was one of those old-timey pointing hand symbols [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manicule


Enticing you to configure the timezones yourself, ehhh? Ehhh? wiggles eyebrows


Not sure if this was an inspiration, but xkcd has a neat clock: https://xkcd.com/now/


No! But this is fabulous! I'd love to add it to the README


Before visiting the site, I thought this was a physical device.


Minute hand covers the hour hand which seems like it could be improved. I added a country and I couldn't see if it had been added because it was under the minute hand.


Very cool! Similar idea: https://www.teamlab.art/w/clock/


That's the closest I've seen! 2004! Wowza!


Well done. I think it would be a bit better if I could adjust my default time zone myself in the setting


If you turn on midnight on top, then the minute hand becomes inverted and counter intuitive, need to fix?


Blur behind menu kills integrated GPU.


Killed it just for you <3


This would be useful for me if I could hide the minute and second hands. Nice work!


Basic yet super powerful.


Put this on YouTube: video can be easily linked/embedded


I really really like this. Congrats!


Nice, very pleasing


Glad you like it!


You might want to rethink the call to vote on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#ring


Thank you! Just removed the word 'voting' from the link to this post


you ever catch a flight from LAX to NEW?


You can rename them to 'GAH!' and ':)' in the Settings! Happy flying!




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