Permatime: New Resource for Global Teams
October 27th, 2008 (11:00am) Mike Gunderloy 6 Comments
We’ve looked at a couple of utilities designed to help teams spread across timezones stay on track, including the FoxClocks addon to Firefox and the EasyTZ site. A new approach, Permatime, offers a new way to check what time it is everywhere – and to represent it in easy-to-read URLs to boot.
When you first visit the Permatime site, you’ll be asked to pick your own timezone – you can type in something like “PST” or “Central” or “Belgrade” and a dropdown list will help you choose. Then, you’ll see your current time in your local timezone. That’s not much – but if you then add “London” and “Moscow” you’ll see the time in all three zones. The site remembers you timezones across visits, too, so if you have a spread-out team you can set it up once and then just go there for current times whenever you want.
But that’s not where the “permatime” comes in. There’s also a button on the user interface to create a new permatime, and when you click it, you get to pick any arbitrary date and time, as well as one of your default timezones. The system will then cough up a URL for you. For example, I’m likely to take my kids trick-or-treating around http://permatime.com/America/Chicago/2008-10-31/17:20. You can see from the URL when that is – and if you visit that URL and set your own timezone, you’ll get the time translated into your local zone.
There’s nothing earth-shattering here, but my experience has been that timezones lead to missed meetings more than anything else. So any service that makes it easier to treat time as a constant rather than a variable has my vote.
6 Comments Post your own comment
Dima says: October 27th, 2008 12:06pm
so how one adds China or Australia?
Tim Diggins says: October 28th, 2008 6:14am
Good question @Dima. Currently we’re just using the published timezone names, which have some drawbacks:
China is apparently listed as PRC (China has only one official timezone). Mostly the timezone listings are based around important cities – but while there is an Asia/Shanghai, there is no Asia/Beijing. Strange. Looks like we will need to fix that locally (follow http://nokahuna.com/projects/1324/tasks/43)
As for Australia – it has multiple timezones, so you need to type in a city you’re intested in, like Melbourne, Sydney, or Adelaide… excitingly (for us timezone geeks) Adelaide is one of the few timezones with an half-hour offset!
neitro says: October 28th, 2008 9:26am
Yeah I am also wondering about the China problem
Dan Power says: October 28th, 2008 10:59am
Could not find New Delhi in India.
Found the interface hard to use …
Tim Diggins says: October 28th, 2008 2:08pm
Hey @Dan Power, I agree with you on India – looks like we have a similar problem to China and need more cities listed (under India/New_Delhi, India/Bangalore, etc.)
As for the interface, anything specific you can identify as confusing/difficult? We’re keen on getting feedback. Feel free to add bugs or feature requests at http://nokahuna.com/projects/1324
Tim Diggins says: October 29th, 2008 5:22pm
We’ve now listed some more cities, and a lot more countries – you should be able to find Bangalore and in fact India (it’s one time zone) and China.
Any more missing locations or suggestions do add them at http://nokahuna.com/projects/1324 or email them direct to suggestions@permatime.com