Panic recently released Status Board, an iPad app for creating digital panels with information about your organization. They include many kind of widgets (graph, table, calendar, feed, feed counter…) and include a time widget with either a clock or digital face. While it looks nice and well designed, it takes quite a bit of space, especially if you want to show more than one timezone on your screen.

I work in a team distributed across multiple timezones. To show everybody’s timezone on our Status Board using the default Time widget would require about an full row in landscape orientation. Also, we would have to remember who is traveling where at anytime. Fortunately, Panic included a DIY widget, which allow users to include a re-sizable view on an arbitrary HTML page.

So I created nTime¹, a simple webpage that you can embed in Status Board, which shows a name and the time for a given GMT offset. It’s just a webpage with a bit of javascript that updates the time every 999 milliseconds, but I hope you’ll find it useful.

Here is a example of a few nTime widgets side by side with a couple of default time widgets:

(See even more nTime widgets on flickr)

You can create your own nTime widget by going to niconomicon.net/statusboard-ntime/nTime/ (preferably on your iPad). There will be a simple form that asks for the location’s name and the GMT offset². Click on the button, and the page will show you the name and time on a white background³. Then, just tap on the “Open in Status Board link” to add it to your StatusBoard⁴.

As it is “just” an HTML page, any text, even with unicode characters will work, even right to left script like Arabic (though emojis seem broken⁵).

Examples:

• Catalpa: David, Anders, Kim, Nicolas
• Krung Thep Maha Nakhon / กรุงเทพมหานคร (Bangkok’s short name).
• Kathmandu / काठमाडौं (GMT offset = +5:45)
• Thiruvananthapuram / തിരുവനന്തപുരം
• Dili, the capital of Timor Leste, missing from Status Board timezones.
• Genève
• Lhasa / ལྷ་ས་
• Seoul / 서울
• Alexandria / لإسكندرية

Caveats:

• For some reason, in status-board, if there is a “.” in the page’s address after the last‘/’, the document.location won’t return anything after that last ‘/’, so don’t use Washington D.C. but rather Washington DC for the name part.
• The widget doesn’t support DST. Thus, if the timezone you are interested in is afflicted with DST, you’ll have to update the url when they stop / start saving daylight again.

Of course, the source is available on github: nTime on github. It is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA (3.0): © Nicolas Hoibian 2013 CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.