If you work for a company abroad or have relatives in another country you want to contact frequently, it's essential to stay up to date on time zones and automatic adjustments for summer and winter time. There are also many websites that report the exact time around the world, but your computer can do the same job without any hassle. All you need is an app, and one of the simplest we've seen is mclocks.
One of the best places to calculate and convert times around the world is Every Time Zone. All you have to do is adjust the slider, and the equivalents for each time zone are reported instantly. However, you're probably thinking of a more local and permanent solution. While you need an Internet connection to sync the clocks, it's likely that a desktop widget with the times of specific regions will be much more useful. That's where mclocks comes in.
Set the time of the whole world on your desktop with mclocks
mclocks is an application developed by Dai Okabayashi on GitHub, and it simply activates a small semi-transparent bar with the times of the cities you've configured. In fact, mclocks is so minimal that it has no configuration interface, and all settings must be made directly on its JSON file. Don't worry, the process is much less intimidating than it seems.
When you open the config.json file located in "Users -> (user) -> AppData -> Roaming", you'll find a relatively simple structure. At the top, you need to copy an entry for each clock you want to configure, using values from the tz database list available on Wikipedia. For example, to add the city of Madrid, we place "Madrid" as the "name" and "Europe/Madrid" as the "timezone".
Finally, the bottom section sets details like the format (whether you want day or month first, and enable 24-hour clocks), the widget's opacity (from 0 to 1 with 0.1 fractions), font color and size, background color, and whether the widget should always stay in the foreground. The color code for the font and background follows a similar line to CSS colors: #0000FF is pure blue, and here we write it as #00F. Not all colors seem to work well, but nothing stops you from experimenting.
Granted: in its current state, mclocks isn't for everyone. Editing a JSON is awkward, the documentation is limited (I basically learned the opacity range through trial and error), and there are no builds compatible with Linux yet, but it's a young application, at version 0.1. Everything it's missing and much more should come in future revisions. Give it a try!
Official website and download: Click here
