Last week XKCD made another great comic, about his 1335th, simply titled ‘NOW‘.
The comic shows the earth in a peculiar circular projection, where the South Pole is in the middle, and the continents are arranged/stretched so that equal radial locations correspond with equal time zones. Around the earth is a fix ‘ring’ with indicators of the hours, and some nice ‘zones’ like typical business hours and ‘rude to call’ hours.
The comic is dynamic: the image updates every 15 minutes, reflecting the current state of the world.
I made a simple web app called xkcdnow.com based on that comic that makes it easy to compare time zones at one glance. Read on for the details.
xkcdnow.com – a time zone converter based on the xkcd comic
I hate dealing with time zones so much, and I like how Randall presents it here, that as a little experiment I made a version of his arrangement where you can show the situation at a given hour of the day using a simple slider. You can try it here right away, but I’ll just state the ‘features’ that are there now. Note that it’s very much a prototype / proof-of-concept, so the code is messy and not at all cross-browser compatible etc etc…
The features:
- On page load, the slider (and earth position) is automatically set to the current time in your local time zone.
- You can add locations of interest by specifying a label, offset compared to GMT/UTC, and a color. So for example you could add ‘Paris’ and then ‘+1′, because Paris is in the GMT+1 time zone.These locations will show the precise time corresponding to your slider position, and also as ‘pie’ areas on the map, for quick location of the spots whose relative time you want to know. Handy for viewing the hours at your company’s different offices worldwide for example.
- Your locations are saved accross sessions using a cookie, so they are still there when you come back later.
Here’s a screenshot of how it currently looks:
Curious what you think! If you like it, please share it so that we can all together break my cheap shared hosting plan.