Wclock world clock display
Wclock world clock display
Wclock is a free, customisable, always-on-top world time clock for Win32 computers.
Quick Page Index: Introduction | Instructions | New Features | Rationale | Download | Time Zones | Troubleshooting | Copying Settings | Uninstalling | Source Code | Acknowledgements | Australia and NZ DST | Contact us
Wclock stays on top of all your windows and shows the time at various locations around the world. It never shows in the icon tray or the taskbar. It just sits there and tells the time until you exit the program. It makes no changes to your system's time settings.
Wclock is a simple Win32 executable file wclock.exe only 34 kB in size. It comes with a help file and a customisable time zone data base file.
I've been using wclock for about a year and just wanted to say thanks.
I manage a team that works with offices in the US, The Netherlands, UK, Australia, and Macau.
I tried a number of other world clock apps and none really worked quite the way I wanted.
The always on top feature, and being able to customize things is great.
- Brian.
Thank you so much for the Clock. I was without it for a week and realized how dependent on it i have become.
Cheers,
-Sandy
This program is excellent - I have been carrying it with me for all the
laptops (~10) I have - never failed to work. Thank you!
-Alvin
Your WClock program is a real gem! Thanks so much.
I've downloaded a couple of similar programs over
recent months and yours is by far the easiest to install and to operate.
-Mike
Love your clock....
-Linda
Download and install the program on your system and then customise the individual clocks to suit your own requirements.
To move the entire clock window, left-click in the black area and keep the left mouse button pressed down while moving the clock to its new position. This new position will be remembered for next time.
To access the menu, right-click with the mouse pointer over the clock and select one of the Menu Options.
To change an individual clock, right-click with the cursor above the clock and select Clock Properties
To view the current time in all time zones currently provided, right-click and select Display all zones...
WM_QUERYENDSESSION and WM_ENDSESSION,
which means the program will quit when told to by the operating system,
and prompt the user to save any changes when the system is about to be shut down.
If the user does not respond in the time allowed, the program will save the changes anyway on the principle that the user probably meant to
save them.
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\...\Run to enable automatic
launch on startup instead of using a .lnk file in the Startup directory. (The setup program removes any existing
.lnk file.) This makes programmatically turning the auto-start feature on and off much easier and
has the added benefit that it will not give an error message if the executable is missing.
Yes, there are lots of other `world clocks' out there, some free, some not. Why on earth produce another? Well, it's purely self interest. We travel a lot between different cities in the world and find an "always-on-top" time display very useful. For a while we got very used to a particular free world-clock utility which sort of worked, but not quite. We couldn't find another that did what we wanted, so we wrote our own, and published the source code for others to make use of.
We hope that Wclock is a quiet, unassuming little program that doesn't hog memory, change settings, or do anything else other than just show the time. And, of course, gets it right. However, we humbly accept that our program, too, may have its problems at certain transition periods with daylight saving around the world, so please let us know if you find one.
Wclock does not attempt to correct your system clock. If you want a utility to correct your system's clock and make sure it's aligned to an accurate atomic clock, we heartily recommend Dimension 4, which we've used for several years on many different Windows systems without any problems whatsoever.
Of course, XP/Vista users, if you are happy having your system reporting back to Redmond every few minutes to get the time and maybe just passing back your latest system configuration while it's at it, then please go ahead and leave the default Windows setting in place. One of the first things we do with any new Windows XP system on our computers is to disable that particular function. Naturally, we'd never suspect that any operating system owner would ever do anything untoward. You can make your own call. To disable:
Wclock is a simple Win32 executable file wclock.exe only 34 kB in size. It comes with a help file and a customisable time zone data base file. Version 1.3.0a issued 1 January 2008 with time zone changes for Aust and NZ updated 30 March 2008.
To copy your Wclock settings to another computer, see Copying WClock Settings.
The following time zones are currently included: Note: the latest changes for Australia and New Zealand below.
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We provide these time zone details in good faith but we don't offer to keep them rigorously up to date. The time zone values provided were checked on 31 January 2007 against Arthur David Olson's database. Daylight saving rules are changed by the authorities frequently, or we may have made a mistake. Please make your own checks (this may require you staying up until 3 a.m. on certain days in March and October to observe a correct transition!).
For more details on adding to or editing time zones, see Adding or changing time zone settings.
Note: if you make changes to the time zones or your computer's clock settings, exit the Wclock program and start it again.
As of 2008, the eastern states of Australia and New Zealand (also an eastern state :-) have changed their daylight saving times.
The eastern states of Australia (NSW,ACT,VIC,SA,TAS) have now coordinated their daylight savings to start on the
first Sunday in October and end on the first Sunday in April.
In New Zealand, Daylight saving now starts on the last Sunday in September and ends on the first Sunday in April the following year.
To fix, either edit your wclocktz.ini file
(which should be in folder C:\Program Files\wclock) as follows
[Australia/Sydney] TZ=AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0 [Australia/Adelaide] TZ=ACST-9:30ACDT,M10.1.0,M4.1.0 [Australia/Hobart] TZ=AEST-10AEDT-11,M10.1.0,M4.1.0 ; --- [Pacific/Auckland] TZ=NZST-12NZDT,M9.5.0/2,M4.1.0/3
or download this updated wclock.ini file (zipped, 1.3kB), unzip it, and overwrite the
existing wclocktz.ini file. This file last updated 30 March 2008 and included in the latest installation download 1.3.0a.
(Alternatively, just download and install the latest version on top of your old one - your settings will be saved.)
You must exit and restart Wclock for
the changes to take effect.
Thanks to James Avery for pointing out the latest change in New Zealand.
wclocktz.ini file and restart
the Wclock program.
Important: If you've made changes to your system's time settings, you must exit the Wclock program and start it again.
Either
wclocktz.ini file
in the directory C:\Program Files\Wclock
You must exit the Wclock program and start it again after making a change to the tz.ini file.
For example, if you live in Melbourne or Calgary, you can use (at least at the time of writing) the standard clocks for Sydney or Denver, respectively. So hold your nose and add the Sydney or Denver time clock, then change the title of the clock (right-click + Clock Properties...) to Melbourne or Calgary so it displays your appropriate city name. If that sticks in the throat too much, then add a new entry to the INI file. We have tried to use the reference cities given in David Olson's TZ database wherever possible, so if you think your city has been unfairly omitted, please contact him.
To uninstall, first try using the standard uninstall option:
This only applies if you installed Wclock using the WclockInst installation program we provided. You must have administrator privileges to remove it. If Wclock does not appear in the Add/Remove list of currently installed programs, follow the instructions below.
If you are experiencing difficulties in uninstalling Wclock from your system and the instructions above do not work, follow these instructions:
If you cannot find the wclock.exe file or the C:\Program Files\Wclock folder,
use Windows Explorer and do a search for the file wclock.exe. When you find it, right-click on the file
and select Properties and check under the Version tab that the company name really is
DI Management Services (you wouldn't want to delete someone else's program of the same name). Then delete the file.
Repeat the search until there are no more copies of the file on your system.
The source code files (37 kB) for Wclock are available under a GPL License. Wclock is written in pure ANSI C. The executable provided was compiled using Microsoft Visual C++5.0. The same source code will also compile using MSVC++6/7/8/... and (with limitations) Borland C++5. We've tested it on Windows Vista, XP, 2000, NT4 and W95 platforms.
To compile using MSVC, create a new, empty `Win32 Application' project and add these files:
wclock.c wclock.h wclock.rc wclock.ico emem.c emem.h lstring.c lstring.h tz.c tz.h
If you make changes and recompile, you are on your own.
The Wclock program demonstrates the following Win32 programming techniques:-
WM_QUERYENDSESSION and WM_ENDSESSION
We've also re-written the `localtime' function from Arthur David Olson's localtime.c source code,
so it can be called repeatedly without using static variables,
looking for any files, or using or setting any environment variables.
Instead, the user passes a time_t value and a POSIX.1 TZ string and the function
returns a broken-down time structure set with the correct local time.
The complicated code is "hidden" behind an opaque pointer named TZ_T and only
the relevant functions are exposed to the user.
Wclock was originally published 30 April 2005. Version 1.3.0 last updated: 1 January 2008.
MD5 signatures of files in the latest distribution signed with our PGP key.
wclocktz.ini file to reflect daylight savings changes in Australia and New Zealand.wclocktz.ini for Baku.Any comments, feedback, questions to our email page.
This page last updated: 11 October 2008
