The way I'm naïvely imagining using this:
- Scroll to the timezone you know the time in.
- Click on the nearest hour.
- It'll highlight that column all over the page.
- Scroll or find the timezone you care about.
- If you're not in a whole-number timezone (Hello India), you'll need to do some additional mental arithmetic by comparing nearby rows.
That's it. Since it's almost entirely static, you can always be sure that you're seeing the same thing on this page as anyone else.
Unfortunately you need to know if you're in daylight savings time or not, something that is often beyond me. I'm not sure what to do about that without reintroducing dynamism that takes the current computer's time into account. Then I again end up wondering if others are seeing what I'm seeing.
There are a few abbreviations for America, Europe and Australia in both pages. You can see *ST and *DT on either page, which might help if you're not observing daylight time yet, but someone else is. There's a tension here between trying not to be overwhelming and emphasizing the Western or Northern hemisphere. My thinking is to only add codes for longitudes with lots of cities or with daylight savings time. Hopefully people in Bhutan or Nigeria or the Chatham Islands won't hold it against me.
Inspired by Bret Victor, but of course the inevitable mistakes are all mine.
This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.
Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.