World Time on your desktop

In an earlier entry, I mentioned that I also keep track of time around the world using a desktop application. Before I forget to name it, here it is.

It’s called, cleverly, World Time 6, and it’s full-featured freeware from Pawprint.net. In addition to letting you set up a floating bar with the correct time for as many time zones as screen real estate will allow, World Time also includes repeating alarms, countdown clocks, a stopwatch, and a time calculator.

It works very well for me, but a few cautions are in order. PawPrint.net is just a hardworking guy in British Columbia. While he has not completely abandoned World Time, he has not updated it in four years. The time zone database it comes with is somewhat out of date, but PawPrint provides all the software tools you need to update time zone offsets and daylight time dates as they change… that is, if you can figure out how to use those tools (I was able to).

Also, the built-in program that synchronizes your computer clock to any one of dozens of ‘atomic clock’ time servers does not play well with Windows XP. I advise you to disable it, especially since Windows XP and Vista provide this synchronization built-in. There are also complaints on World Time’s forums that the program has other compatibility problems with Windows Vista.

Having said all that, if you’re even a little bit handy with computers and you want a desktop World Time program, this full-featured item is certainly worth a try, especially at the price of $0.