World Clock

Sure enough time passes in the same way regardless of your location on the globe, but sunlight isn’t everywhere at the same time, and the gap between time zones is strictly dedicated to fixing this. As such, World Clock wants to provide visual support for different time zones on the globe, including areas where Sun is up.

Note that the application doesn’t come packed in an installer to take any of your time and effort. You can go ahead and run it right after it’s downloaded, and even carry it on a thumb drive to always have it at hand. However, the computer you use it on needs to be equipped with Java Runtime Environment.

Launching the application might leave you scratching your head for a while, mostly because there are no visible value fields, except a large preview area. It shows a representation of the world map, as well as sunlight and night time judging by the system time. Even so, the application works just fine, but isn’t configured yet to show details.

The application is a bit more than just a visual representation of day/night cycle. There’s a sample configuration file you can load from the options menu. Doing so adds several popular location along with the current time. The preview area updates accordingly as time passes, with proper visual feedback.

The configuration file is responsible for showing you details on the map. It comes in the form of an XML script which can be edited to include more regions. There’s no limit to the number of regions to display, but there isn’t a built-in option to pick other locations as well, which means research needs to be manually performed, and so does code writing.

World Clock is surely not the clock to rely on for daily activities, but it’s sure a fun way to view daylight and time around the world. It mostly comes in handy on a second monitor, preferably set up as a kiosk. It’s portable, and requires little effort to configure time zones, even though some research needs to be performed.