- I built a digital clock for my neighbor with Alzheimer a few years ago. It was a web app with an analog clock and it would show Morning / Afternoon / Evening / Night on the side.
I felt quite proud of myself, since she often got confused about whether it was 6am or 6pm on her analog clocks at home. (Alzheimer's can bring a loss of the sense of time.)
But while she thought it was a great idea, every time I came back, she had turned off the dedicated tablet we set up for the purpose
I ended up just buying her an Alzheimer's clock — a 24 hour clock with pictures indicating the time of day, for $15 or so. That one stayed where we put it!
- That was very kind of you - both to want to solve her problem and to admit that your solution you put effort into wasn't the best one for her.
- Thank you for sharing this.
- Very clean and polished! I love how smooth the seconds hand move.
I work in an environment where we look at the time across many different timezones around the world. A couple of feature requests if you are ever in the mood:
1. Make it possible to specify the timezone. 2. Make it possible to create a grid of clocks, each with different timezones. 3. Persist the grid/timezone state in the URL so links can be easily shared.- You can now select timezone with URL parameters in IANA timezones: ?tz=America/New_York ?tz=Europe/London ?tz=Asia/Tokyo
- Wonderful! Thanks for the quick turnaround.
- There is also iFrame support, you can easily now make own local html file with multiple clock on different timezones. Quick also to reload after reboot, since static local file to open. If you end up using this in work, I would love to hear more about it, because then my project would have someone using it:)
- Clock now also moves very slowly in screen, in dark mode it can reduce screen burn.
- Thank you! Very good idea, I look forward to implement URL timezone parameters to get it on different zones without it affecting to UI in any way.
- This is actually pretty cool. It's just a clock, nothing more, nothing less. Animations are smooth. I actually prefer these analogue clocks over digital as I seem to be able to plan ahead better with it.
- Love the correct time in the favicon. Nice touch.
- You found it!
- Nice job. Consider adding a option to turn on a "tick sound" as the second hand moves.
Also maybe see if you can get yours linked to clockfaceonline.co.uk
They have a bunch of analog clock visualizations. I particularly like the magical themed one:
- There is so many nice clocks. I didn't even know analog clocks are so popular!
- Right? If you want to see something pretty amusing, there was a fairly popular HN post a while back where a bunch of LLM models were continuously (every minute) asked to one-shot an analog clock.
- Love how clean it looks.
Related, I made a clock with a moire pattern (10 years ago now) and still love coming back to it.
The hands all spin with css transitions and I remember there was a Safari bug where if I zoomed in, the rotation would reset itself
- Wow that was a trip for my eyes, nice! Thank you for sharing.
- I appreciate the straightforwardness of this. If I could make one request, it would be to support more of a "tick" mode instead of the continuous second hand motion. It doesn't even have to actually make noises, I just like the visuals of the clock hand starting and stopping every second. I don't know if there's a more formal name for this in Clock World
- Added ticking and liked it so much its default mode :)
- If you're looking for more to add: ticking second hands have momentum. How about having the ticking hand go beyond the proper place by a degree, then snap back into proper position?
- Can you set it to ticks instead of continuous running of the seconds clockhand That would be great. The vast majority of analog clocks have a ticking clockhand for the seconds, if any at all (can you make the seconds optional?).
The only clocks I know of with such a motor are station clocks, like the Swiss one mentioned already, or the German variant (same manufacturer). But these have a twist: the minute clockhand does not run continuously, but also ticks. The seconds are running a little bit faster until the clockhand is in the upper position, then waits for a signal from the main clock. Only then the minute clockhand jumps one minute and the seconds are starting again.
An example can be seen here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahnhofsuhr#Technik
- Most mechanical watches unwind smoothly, ticks are typically due to a powered quartz crystal.
- Thank you for the feedback. I see if I add toggle to select tick/sliding.
- This is something I vibecoded to learn my kid the clock. I think this is a very good use of ai coding, stuff that is for visualization and temporary learning.
- That was nice thing to do, did it help your kid to learn?
- Somehow related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock
- Something related to cultural appropriation, but it reminded me of Canary Wharf (London) clocks, https://canarywharf.com/artwork/konstantin-grcic-six-public-...
- Want to carry that on your wrist, or hang to your wall?
You're covered (down to the stalling second in some models): https://mondaine.com/
- Clock took some inspiration of our kitchen clock.
- The PTB (national metrology institute of Germany) provides a similar clock for decades. It is one of the few displaying the real time, not your computer’s time. The difference (if any) can be shown.
There is also a time announcement if needed.
- That looks nice!
- This looks really clean, excellent job!
- Thank you for the nice words :)
- Pretty cool idea, i wish it had that nostalgic ticking sound of seconds.
- It takes current time from client browser and shows it. No adjustments or alarms.
- Very smooth. Is the code open source?
- Seems to be simple enough (just plain JS not minimified, and CSS), that you can just look at the source view-source:https://www.clocksimulator.com/
Good ol' days spirit
- Thank you. Code can be viewed at https://github.com/timoheimonen/clocksimulator
- Thanks! I was keen to find out how you prevented screen sleep and was interested to find out about wakeLock.
- iframe support added, can be found under Info button.
- Very nice. My only suggestion would be to slightly differentiate more the hour and minute hands (so that at a quick glance, someone, perhaps even a child) can immediately distinguish between them. (i.e., hour hand slightly shorter/fatter)
- Better than 90% of the slop that gets ladled into the front page, bravo. The world needs more Clock Simulator-like projects.
- Thank you very much!
- wow bro. how did you even come up with the idea. I also like the fact that there is a toggle that you can switch if you want screen on. pretty smart
- Listened my wife talk about her job, she works as preschool teacher and she has talked about clocks etc. Well then I thought that I could do minimal web page with analog lock, SURE clocksimulator.com domain cannot be free....
76 points by user_timo 7 hours ago | 70 comments