That clock showed you the vaccination time that was now safe to leave, having been observed for 15 minutes.

Distinguishable figures are awesome.

You know when to plant things in the garden, when the peaks of trimming and gardening work are in the year, and when the heatwaves will be over with. It's very nice.

You're right, this clock doesn't remove the local times and replace them with UTC; instead this clock overlays the local times with a replacement "A-X time", which is a single timezone applied to everywhere. Not UTC, but a new, non-standardized "DIY" UTC. That's the whole thing it does: throw away the location-specific "daylight-hours" quantifier (the "hour" part of the time) and replace it with a "single timezone" version (where it's "F:30" everywhere on earth at the same time), but instead of the globally-recognized standard of UTC, it's a brand-new standard that arbitrarily uses letters rather than numbers (with an "origin point" that's unclear -- where in the world is A:00 equal to 00:00? I couldn't find it, so I couldn't easily figure out my timezone's offset so that I could reason about daylight hours).

I've seen clocks that do this already, but with UTC instead of "A-X time": they have two "dials", one for local time and one for UTC. That's all this is, just with letters instead of numeric hours (an arbitrary substitution) and a newly-made-up "base" timezone instead of UTC.

There's no functional difference between consulting a clock like this so that you can say "F:30" to all of your teammates and it'll be the same time everywhere, and consulting a UTC clock so that you can say "10:30 UTC" to all of your teammates and it'll be the same time everywhere, except that most people have memorized their local UTC offset and can go "oh, okay, 10:30 - 5 hours = 5:30", where with F:30 they have to go consult your website instead.

Having a configurable "meeting time" feature is neat, but like...that's an extra tool you had to build on top of your clock system, not an intrinsic feature of your clock system itself. I need a complex translator tool to tell me what A-X hours are reasonable for meeting with people because I can't just simply apply offsets in my head and get intuitive results (especially because the "base" offsets are unclear).

I think a lot of folks overestimate how painful it is to do modulo addition/subtraction, compared to how painful it is to learn an entirely new system of timekeeping-and-translation.

ZXX:XX surely. For example, we could meet at Z1340 even. To me this is a question making the string unique enough that people won't accidentally think of it as a local time. The military uses 24-hour times in a similar manar, e.g. "Oh-seven-hundred", etc. So aside from Z13:40 possibly looking too close to just 13:40, it does communicate the time for people to meet, regardless of how many timezones are involved. What's the best time to meet is a whole other question...

I honestly haven't even started to think about how this integrates with DST and other funky locale calendar rules.

I'm going to be busy for a bit, but hopefully I remember to come back to this thread...

> Would you like to give hTime a go and test it for some days?

Perhaps... but to be perfectly honest, I haven't yet decided if I love or hate this idea yet.

To give you an idea about how I'm thinking of this, first and foremost hTime is a time format, meaning it's just some mapping of letters to a local time's hour. The most interesting part to me is that, since I read left to right, I also see the locale information first as opposed to last. You can rightfully argue that the locale is needed to interpret the rest of the time, so this is the correct way to format world times. On the other hand, world times are the same as local times for everyone within earshot of me, so I would never bother prefixing things locally.

Secondly, it's a tool for helping people with world clocks and scheduling.

My concern is that there are better solutions to the first thing, despite any improvements made to the second. For example, would it not be better to simply prefix the timezone information directly? For example, it's currently Z22:36. We do use more characters, especially if we want to be able to extend this to local times too (e.g. +5-03:36). I might be tempted to start trying to lay this out so the math works out for (+5) adding directly to the hour as 5+03:36 = Z22:36, but now I realize a larger problem with all this... dates.

Placing the offset in the middle of the full time string 2021-10-20 together with 22:36 requires thought. I'm tempted to like it, because the timezone offset is obviously much more related to the time than the date, but moving it closer to the date really couldn't hurt, could it?

Take either hTime, or my example:

- 2021-10-20+5-03:36

- 2021-10-20Z22:36

- 2021-10-20Q:36

We just replace the 'T' in ISO-8601 with the 'Z' part or with nothing before an hTime. Now I get to complain that 'Z' looks way too much like 2... Meanwhile https://thehtime.com/ hasn't loaded and I can't remember the mapping for the current time, so I don't think I've written my example consistently.

I think that's the part of hTime I like the least. I have no hope of decoding it without knowing what it is. Meanwhile an 8601 datetime stamp can be somewhat inferred. So to quote you, if I may, "[the] main thing is we find a good way to get rid of time zone math!". But we can't get rid of the time zone math... it's just either arithmetic, or a special code.

Anyway, I'm just bored right now over here thinking on paper. Always glad to hear that my feedback is somewhat useful. Thanks.