Show HN: I made a tool to compare time zones

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

A new web-based time zone comparison tool that uses draggable sliders and clean “card” layouts is earning praise for making it easier to coordinate meetings and calls across multiple cities. Commenters highlight its intuitive design and usefulness for remote work, while suggesting enhancements such as future date selection (to handle daylight saving shifts), URL-based sharing, customizable labels, better mobile layouts, and clearer day/night indicators. The tool is frequently compared with established services like World Time Buddy and Every Time Zone, prompting side conversations about data accuracy, UI originality, and whether small utilities like this should worry about SEO or monetization at all.

Overall reception & use cases

  • Very positive overall: many call it simple, slick, intuitive, and bookmark it as a new “daily driver.”
  • Common use cases: coordinating meetings across multiple time zones (teams in US/EU/Asia), remote workers (e.g., Phoenix vs. East Coast), international students and families, and trip planning.
  • A few note their calendar apps and phone clocks already cover most needs, so they’re unsure how often they’d use it.

UX and interaction design

  • Slider-based time adjustment is widely praised as fast and intuitive.
  • Some like the generous whitespace and minimalism; others feel there’s too much dead space, especially on mobile where only 2–3 time zones fit without scrolling. Requests to compress vertical space and allow shorter cards.
  • Reordering via drag works on desktop but is intentionally disabled on small screens; several want it on mobile too.
  • Reset-to-now behavior confuses some users; multiple people want a single global reset button rather than per-card controls.
  • Several prefer a single-column layout on desktop (like the mobile view) to see slider alignment more clearly.

Feature requests

  • Strong demand for:
    • Link sharing / URL-encoded state (already partially implemented later in the thread).
    • Choosing future/past dates, especially to handle DST changes and overlapping weeks between regions.
    • Text input for time in addition to sliders; finer-grained increments on tap.
    • Display of local timezone names/abbreviations and DST indicators or changeover dates.
    • Per-timezone 12/24‑hour settings and automatic 12/24 detection from locale.
    • Custom labels for cities, saving configurations, and a “live” pinned world clock mode.
    • Visual cues: day/night coloring, sun position, highlighting when dates differ, and key reference times on the sliders.
    • PWA support, offline capability, better mobile icon, and possibly a Mac/menu-bar style version.

Data quality & bugs

  • Multiple issues reported with the location/timezone database: cities mapped to wrong countries (e.g., Belgrade/Kosovo, Hanoi/Thailand, Oslo/Bouvet Island), and some locations missing or hard to find (e.g., San Francisco, Arizona/CEST naming).
  • UI bugs: font glyph/spacing issues, colon rendering on Linux, overlapping digits, odd behavior on iPhone/iPad where sliders move cards, and confusion over a perceived “pill position” bug that is actually intended highlighting logic.
  • Some discrepancies are traced to how standard timezone identifiers map to countries.

Comparisons to other tools

  • Frequent comparisons to Every Time Zone, World Time Buddy, Timeanddate, Overlap, and others.
  • Some prefer the new tool’s clarity and aesthetics; others favor row-based or calendar-style layouts with range selection and built-in “good/bad time” bands.
  • Several note this tool’s main advantages as configurability, simplicity, and the strong domain name.

Monetization, SEO, and HN ranking

  • Discussion around why build it given many competitors; several argue projects don’t need monetization or SEO goals and can be “for fun” or to scratch an itch.
  • Concerns that strong tools are hard to discover due to SEO dynamics; others say that’s acceptable if mass reach isn’t the goal.
  • Brief debate about Hacker News ranking behavior and how the algorithm downranks or demotes posts.

Design originality controversy

  • A separate thread notes a very similar UI at another site; the earlier developer claims the design was copied.
  • The new tool’s author responds that they used that design as inspiration but rebuilt it for performance, additional search features, and different privacy trade-offs, and intends to open-source their version.