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 | Latest News | Instructions | How to move it | Automatic Update | Rationale | Download | Latest TZ Info | Time Zones | Troubleshooting | Copying Settings | Uninstalling | Source Code | Acknowledgements | 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 63 kB in size. It comes with a help file and a customisable time zone data base file.
There's an update for the daylight savings file available. See Automatic Update Feature and Latest Time Zone 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
At last I have found the perfect, easy to download and change clock from a pragmatic owner. Thanks!
-Sheldon B.
Excellent program, by the way - I am a longhaul pilot with BA and I find the program invaluable when I am away on trips.
-Jamie C.
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...
It's an indicator that an update is available, either for the time zone database, or for the Wclock program itself. See Automatic Update Feature.
The automatic update feature is actually a notification of update availability. You can set in your preferences to check once a day if an update is available (this literally exchanges a few bytes each way with our web server). We have designed this to be as inobtrusive as possible so there are no annoying pop-ups.
If an update is available, it will show a red dot at the top of each clock. For more details, right-click and select Check for Updates. If you don't want to be reminded just now, check the Remind me later box on this menu. To turn off this feature, uncheck the Check for updates daily box on the Preferences menu. You can still do a manual check whenever you want.
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 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 in XP:
Wclock is a simple Win32 executable file wclock.exe only 63 kB in size. Version 1.4.2 is now signed with an authentication certificate (to check: right-click on the exe file then select Properties > Digital Signatures). It comes with a help file and a customisable time zone data base file.
Download it now and read the instructions above.
After installing, use the menu option Check for Updates to see if there is an update available for the time zone info database.
To copy your Wclock settings to another computer, see Copying WClock Settings.
Executable:
wclock.exe File version: 1.4.2.1 last modified: 2009/12/05 02:37:48 GMT size: 63800 bytes md5: af2a5725bae587a3b59e54df65b8543b crc32: a3f7ce90
The latest version of the time zone database file wclocktz.ini with a time-stamp of
2009-10-09T11:55Z is included in the latest distribution.
Spare copy: wclocktz.ini (zipped, 1.6 kB).
wclocktz.ini Timestamp: 2009-10-09T11:55Z Size: 3345 bytes crc32: 08B65F3F
Use the Check for Updates menu option to see the current TZ info file details on your system. If a new TZ info file is available, click on the Install Latest TZ Info File button. You must then exit and re-start the program. (To exit: right-click on the clock and select Exit. To start again: Start > Programs > Wclock.)
Note: this TZ info file will only work with Wclock version 1.4.0.0 and later.
The following time zones are currently included:
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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 in April 2009 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!).
The time zones included are either ones we find useful ourselves or have been added at the request of users. We deliberately don't include countries that require a change every year (like Israel) and it does not do obscure rules that involve, say, Easter. See also My time zone is not included.
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 zone info file or your computer's clock settings, exit the Wclock program and start it again.
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.
You must exit the Wclock program and start it again after making a change to the wclocktz.ini file.
For example, if you live in Melbourne or Calgary, you can use (at least at the time of writing this) 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 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 should also compile using MSVC++6/7/8/9/... and (with limitations) Borland C++5. We've tested it on Windows Vista, XP, 2000, W98 and W95 platforms.
The source code for versions 1.4.0.0 and 1.4.0.2 is identical. The only change is a re-compile and the addition of a digital signature.
Source code: wclock-1.4.0.src.zip (62 kB). [MD5 signatures signed with our PGP key].
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%APPDATA% directory
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.
It's come to our attention that some of the more paranoid AV products are showing our latest
Wclock executable as a trojan, usually
of the category Trojan.Downloader.Gen.
It's not. This is a false-positive. We suspect the cause is that the latest version has a new automatic update feature in it to check if the timezone data is out of date. If activated, this queries our site once a day to see if an update is available. That's all. This feature presumably "looks" like a trojan to some AV products. It's certainly much more benign than all the stuff Microsoft's latest products do, or Adobe, or Apple. We added this feature because every March and October, when daylight saving changes happen, we spend ages dealing with queries about why the daylight savings time is now wrong in <insert city here>. Having an automatic check makes it easier to let people know there are changes to the timezone file in a timely manner. The program doesn't even download anything automatically, it just advises that it's available. You can turn it off.
The program is open source and published with an MD5 checksum.
December 2009: the program is now properly signed with an authenticated digital signature in our name.
The full source code with digital signatures is published on this page
and you are welcome to check it yourself to see there is no malicious code -
search for checkForUpdates and inetGetUrl.
If you have any helpful suggestions on this, please let us know.
We could just remove that feature - or kill the product. Ironically, being freeware makes it more suspicious.
Wclock was originally published 30 April 2005. Version 1.4.2.1 last updated: 5 December 2009.
wclocktz.ini file - see Latest Time Zone File.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: 21 December 2009
