Wclock world clock display

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Wclock is a free, customisable, always-on-top world time clock for Windows computers.

Introduction

Wclock stays on top of all your windows and shows the time at various locations around the world. It just sits there quietly and tells the time until you exit the program. It makes no changes to your system's time settings. Wclock is a small, simple Win32 executable file wclock.exe which should work on any modern Windows platform. It comes with a help file and a customisable time zone data base file.

  

Latest News

• 28 April 2022: New version 1.6.5 released. See New in the latest version.
• 4 May 2020: New version 1.6.4 released.
• 2 May 2020: Updated wclocktz.ini file released with changes for Yukon in 2020 (America/Whitehorse) plus added extra cities in Europe and Canada.
• 17 December 2019: New TZ info released with changes for Brazil in 2019 (DST has been abolished).
• 28 August 2017: New version 1.6.3 released.
• 26 March 2017: New version 1.6.2 released.
• 8 February 2017: Updated wclocktz.ini file released with changes for Turkey. Thanks to Jo-Ann Lea for telling us about the change, and to Brendan for pointing out the typo with Kathmandu.
• 23 July 2016: New version 1.6.1 released. Timezone file updated.
• 23 October 2015: Updated wclocktz.ini file released with changes for Moscow in Russia. Thanks to Justin Bukowski for telling us about the change.
• 3 June 2015: New version 1.6 released.
• December 2012: New version 1.5.2 released with option to show date in the clock.
• January 2012: New version 1.5 released. See Advanced Features.
• October 2009: What is that red dot?

  

  The red dot means there's an update available for the daylight savings file or a newer version of Wclock has been released. See Automatic Update Feature and Latest Time Zone File.

• Is Wclock a trojan? (Answer: No).

Feedback

Instructions

Download and install the program on your system and then customise the individual clocks to suit your own requirements. Please read The Manual.

How to move the clock on your screen

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.

If, for some reason, this is not remembered, see My changes are not saved.

How to access the menu (and get Help)

To access the menu, right-click with the cursor anywhere over the clock and select one of the Menu Options. For help, select the, er..., Help option.

How to exit the program

Right-click to get the menu options and select Exit

How to start the program

Start > All Programs > Wclock

How to change an individual clock

To change an individual clock, right-click with the cursor above the clock and select Clock Properties. Note the new Format option ("www dd") to display the date in the form "Tue 4th".

How to view the current time in all time zones

To view the current time in all time zones currently provided, right-click and select Display all zones...

Hover over city name to view details

Hold the cursor over the city name and the timezone/date/day-of-week will display. Don't click, just hover.

How to show the Wclock icon

There should be an icon in the "system tray" a.k.a. the "taskbar" a.k.a. the "notifications area" at the bottom right of the screen, where the system clock usually shows.

Windows hides these icons by default if they are not being used. Right-click on the "Show hidden icons arrow to see it.

To set the icon to be permanently visible, click on the Customize... link, find the Wclock entry and choose the drop-down box for Show icon and notifications.

But I have Windows 8 and cannot see a start menu or the notifications area!

Mmm, yes, great design by Microsoft, isn't it? The new start menu in Windows 10 isn't much better (IOHO).

We recommend Classic Shell which gives you back the classic start menu.

How to set your preferences

Right-click and select Preferences.

How to hide the clocks

To hide the clocks, right-click anywhere in the Wclock window and select Hide clocks (or right-click on the Wclock icon in the system tray).

To restore, right-click on the Wclock icon in the system tray at the bottom right-hand side of your screen and select Show clocks.

If the clock has become lost by being obscured by other windows, use the Refresh option. To turn on the icon, set Show icon in system tray in the Preferences. More on this in the manual.

How to make the font size larger

What's that red dot?

The red dots are an indicator that an update is available, either for the time zone database, or for the Wclock program itself. See Automatic Update Feature.

What do the plus and minus signs mean?

A plus sign (+) before the time means that the time is the next day compared to your local time. A minus sign (-) means the time is the day before. This feature cannot be turned off.

In the example above, it is Wednesday in local time, but the minus sign before the time in Honolulu means it is still Tuesday there.

New in the latest version

Version 1.6.5 April 2022

• Added feature to capture a timestamp for a clock to the clipboard. Thanks to James Schmidt for the suggestion.
• Updated the time zone info file to fix DST changes for Paraguay, Chile and Azerbaijan.

Version 1.6.4 May 2020

• Minor improvements for speed and performance.
• Updated the time zone info file by adding various European and Canadian cities.
• Added ability to sort columns in Display all zones... (click on the column header).
• Added double signing with both SHA-1 and SHA-256 for all distributed executables.

Version 1.6.3 August 2017

• Added option to turn off "always-on-top" feature.
• Added "Reset position" option from system tray icon menu. This will reset the position of the clocks back to the top left of your primary monitor. Use as a last-ditch attempt to find the clocks if you've been using multiple monitors. See My clock is out of range when I change monitors
• Made improvements to automatic update feature so AV programs won't prevent it working.
• The Save settings option is now always active (for those situations where changes in position just aren't being saved).

Version 1.6.2 March 2017

• Fixed links to web site so they work on Windows 10.
• Added sound for countdown clock.

Version 1.6.1 July 2016

• Added option to restart when program launched again. This is useful if clock or taskbar icon mysteriously disappears under W10 - see My clock sometimes disappears.
• Updated timezone file for various changes around the world, including Venezuela and Chile.
• Added remaining time zones in Australia including Broken Hill and Lord Howe Island.
• Improved the automatic update feature to work better with user access control.

Version 1.6.0 June 2015

• Added option to export and import settings using a text file. See Export and Import Settings.
• Improved installation program: the setup program now automatically closes Wclock if it is running, and restarts it afterwards.
• Improved updates of latest TZ information and new version of Wclock in the Automatic Update Feature. These now download all they need and automatically restart the program with the new information/version. You still need to click on the buttons to make them work. Look for the red dots!
• Fixed the black-on-black problem when using the High Contrast colour scheme.
• Removed the "Donate" button and other nagging requests to make a donation. [However, if you can, please make a donation to support the continued development of Wclock.]
• Put back the "Save Settings" option in the main menu. Any changes should be saved immediately and automatically, but on some systems, for unknown reasons, this wasn't happening. This option is a manual override. It will be grayed out unless you've actually changed something.

Version 1.5.2 December 2012

Added option to show date instead of time: . See How to change an individual clock.

Version 1.5 January 2012

See New features in version 1.5.

1. Added option to hide the clocks and a new icon in the system tray which you can use to restore the clocks.
2. Added a choice of two larger font sizes for the clock faces.
3. Will now remember its last position properly on a dual-monitor system.
4. Automatically saves any changes to the clocks or preferences immediately. Removed the now redundant "Save Settings" option.
5. Increased the maximum number of individual clocks from 20 to 64.
6. Added a "Refresh" option to repaint the clock display. This helps if the clock has been obscured.
7. Added a calendar option, which will also compute the number of days from today to a given date.
8. Added a countdown timer, which will set off an alarm after a given period of time.
9. Added the option to Make a Donation to support development costs. [Removed in version 1.6.]

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.

To install the latest TZ info

1. Right-click on the clock and select Check for Updates.
2. Click on the Install latest TZ info file. This should download and install the latest time zone info (it should only take a few seconds).
3. New in v1.6: Once the TZ info is downloaded and installed, the clock will restart automatically with the new settings. There may be a delay of a couple of seconds. The red dots should now be gone.
4. Click on Close to close the window.
5. Right-click on the clock and select Exit.
6. Then start Wclock again. It should start without the red dot.

To install the latest version automatically

If a new version of Wclock is available, the red dots will show and the status message ATTENTION: a newer version of Wclock is available will show.

1. Right-click on the clock and select Check for Updates.
2. Click on the Get Latest Version button, which should be active.
3. A (black) console window should appear for a few seconds showing progress on the download. You may get prompted by User Account Control to click "Allow program to make changes" (see below). Once completed, the program will restart with the new version.
4. All done!

If this doesn't work for some reason, download the latest version from the Download page and install using the setup program. (Some Anti-Virus programs may interfere with the automatic installation. Version 1.6.3 has a fix for this.)

Export and import settings

New in v1.6: These options are available in the Preferences menu.

To export settings

1. Right-click on the clock and select Preferences.
2. Click on the Export button.
3. Select a directory and filename: the default filename is wclock-settings.wclk. This is a text file. Keep this safe or copy to another machine.

To import settings

1. Right-click on the clock and select Preferences.
2. Click on the Import button.
3. You will be warned:
   
4. Use the Windows dialog to find the existing file and click on Open.
5. You get a final chance to confirm:
   
6. Click on OK. The program should restart after a short delay with the new settings.

Rationale: Why yet another world time clock?

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.

Download

Wclock is a simple Win32 executable file wclock.exe only 220 kB in size. The executable and setup programs are signed with our authenticated code-signing certificate (to check: right-click on the exe file then select Properties > Digital Signatures). Wclock comes with a help file and a customisable time zone database 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 Export and import settings.

Latest Time Zone File

The latest version of the time zone database file wclocktz.ini with a time-stamp of 2022-10-31T17:38 is included in the latest distribution. Spare copy: wclocktz.ini (zipped, 2.4 kB).

Use the Check for Updates menu option to see the Current TZ info file details on your system. They should match the details below (unless you've edited it yourself).

wclocktz.ini
Timestamp: 2022-10-31T17:38ZZ
Size:  5886 bytes
crc32: DE91169A

If a new TZ info file is available, click on the Install Latest TZ Info File button. Wclock should download the TZ info (it's a small file) and then automatically restart with the new info. If for some reason it doesn't restart, then manually exit and start the program again. (To exit: right-click on the clock and select Exit. To start again: Start > Programs > Wclock.)

Adding or changing time zone data

The following time zones are currently included:

Adelaide Almaty Amsterdam Anchorage Athens Auckland Bahrain Baku Bangkok Beijing Berlin Bogata Brisbane, QLD Broken Hill, NSW Brussels Bucharest Budapest Buenos Aires Cairo Cape Verde Caracas

Chicago Christmas Is. Cocos Is. Costa Rica Dakar Darwin, NT Delhi Denver Dubai Dublin Edmonton, AB Eucla, WA Halifax, NS Helsinki Hobart, TAS Hong Kong Honolulu Istanbul Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland Jakarta Jerusalem

Johannesburg Kamchatka Kathmandu Kiev Lagos Lima Lisbon London Lord Howe Is. Los Angeles Madrid Mexico City Montevideo Moscow Nairobi New York Norfolk Is. Noumea Paris Perth Phoenix

Port Moresby Prague Regina, SK Rome Santiago Sao Paulo Singapore Sofia South Georgia St Johns, NL Sydney Taipei Tokyo Toronto Tuvalu Vancouver, BC Vienna Warsaw Whitehorse, YT Winnipeg UTC (GMT)

We provide these time zone details in good faith but we don't offer to keep them rigorously up to date. 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!). 2015-05-21: Thanks to "Greg" for telling us about Egypt stopping daylight saving in 2015.

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 and it does not do obscure rules that involve, say, Easter or other religious holidays. 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.

My times are wrong

See Troubleshooting in the manual and Setting your system clock and time zone.

Important: If you've made changes to your system's time settings, you must exit the Wclock program and start it again.

My changes are not saved

I make changes to the clocks but after I reboot the changes have gone

We have had a few reports of this. The program is meant to save all changes to the user's personal registry immediately they are made, but sometimes, for some reason, it doesn't. We suspect it is some sort of protection issue on certain configurations of Windows.

Try making your changes, then

1. Use the Save Settings option (see image below)
2. then quit Wclock explicitly by using right-click-on-the clock then Exit.
3. Then start again by doing Start > All Programs > Wclock.

If your change comes up this time, then it should be permanent.

If this does not work, then try uninstalling and then install again with a fresh download.

My clock sometimes disappears

My clock is out of range when I change monitors

This may happen if you attach multiple external monitors and then disconnect them. Windows 10 seems to think it still has the "phantom" monitors attached and Wclock is out of range and not visible. As of v1.6.3 there is an option Reset position in the context menu of the icon in the system tray. This will reset the position of the clocks to the top left of your primary display.

My time zone is not included

Either

1. Use an existing time zone that matches yours and change the title in Clock Properties; or
2. Add a new entry to the wclocktz.ini file.

To add a new entry to wclocktz.ini, see the section Adding New Time Zones in the help file (right-click + Help...). Remember to exit the Wclock program and start it again after making a change to the wclocktz.ini file.

But if there is another city with the same time zone, then just use that. For example, if you live in Melbourne, you can use (at least at the time of writing this) the standard clock for Sydney. So hold your nose and add the Sydney time clock, then change the title of the clock (right-click + Clock Properties...) to Melbourne so it displays your appropriate city name. Similarly, you can use the Denver clock for Calgary, the Bangkok clock for Hanoi and Jakarta, and so forth.

We have tried to use the reference cities given in the IANA Time Zone Database wherever possible, so if you think your city has been unfairly omitted, please contact them.

Uninstalling

To uninstall, first try using the standard uninstall option:

1. Make sure the Wclock program is not running - right-click anywhere in the clock window and select Exit.
2. In Windows 10/8/7/Vista: Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features
   XP and earlier: Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs
3. Select Wclock and click on Change/Remove. This should start the uninstall program which will completely remove the program.

The above 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.

Wclock still won't go away!

If you are experiencing difficulties in uninstalling Wclock from your system and the instructions above do not work, follow these instructions:

1. You must have administrator privileges when un-installing.
2. Make sure the Wclock program is not running - right-click in the black area of the clock and select Exit.
3. Start > Settings > Taskbar and Start Menu > Advanced tab > Advanced button (or similar, the exact choices depend on what version of windows you have)
4. This should put you in Explorer display in a folder called Start Menu.
5. Go down into the folder Start Menu\Programs\Startup and delete the shortcut Wclock, if present.
6. In Windows Explorer, navigate to the folder C:\Program Files\Wclock or C:\Program Files (x86)\Wclock on a 64-bit machine (thanks, Bill).
7. If the file wclock.exe is still there, delete it.
8. To complete the removal, delete the entire folder C:\Program Files\Wclock and any other files in there.

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.

Source Code

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++ 12 (MSVC 2013). 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 10, 8, 7, Vista, XP, 2000, W98 and W95 platforms.

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.

Techniques used

The Wclock program demonstrates the following Win32 programming techniques:-

• How to create an 'always-on-top' window
• Double-buffering with a bitmap to avoid display flicker
• Using combo boxes in a dialog
• Using a Tooltip control
• Saving settings in the registry
• Reading data from an INI file
• Creating OWNERDRAW buttons
• Opening a WinHelp file
• Using context (right-click) menus
• Using a mutex to prevent the program being loaded twice
• Creating a ListView in a dialog
• Using WM_QUERYENDSESSION and WM_ENDSESSION
• Finding the %APPDATA% directory
• Making a URL link in a dialog
• Opening the default web browser
• Using INET to receive data from a (specially customised) CGI web page

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.

Planned Improvements

Many people have written to suggest improvements. Thank you. We are grateful for the feedback. The most popular in recent years have been:

1. Capture a timestamp from the clock to the clipboard - done
2. Fix the display on high-contrast monitor settings - done
3. Add an option to increase the font size - done
4. Add some option to temporarily hide the clock - done
5. Make it remember its position on a dual-monitor setup - done
6. Add an option to show the date instead of the time - done
7. Make the clock not always on top - done
8. Add an option to display the times vertically down the page instead of horizontally (still pending, I'm afraid).
9. Make the clock go transparent - sorry, can't be done.

Is Wclock a trojan?

It's come to our attention that some of the more paranoid AV products are showing our Wclock executable as a trojan, usually of the category Trojan.Downloader.Gen.

It's not. This is a false-positive. Send the executable directly to the AV company and they'll give it the all clear (if you can figure out how to do that - they make it very difficult to do).

We suspect the problem was probably caused by using UPX to compress the executable. We've stopped using it as of version 1.6.1. This bloated out the executable size from 88 kB file to an enormous 222 kB.

The executable is signed with our code authentication certificate issued to "D.I. Management Services Pty Limited" (for which we pay a lot of money). The full open-source source code with MD5 checksums and digital signatures is published on this page and you are welcome to check it yourself to see there is no malicious code (and don't worry about the function searchDriveForCreditCardDetailsAndSendToRussianServer :-).

Revision History

Wclock was originally published 30 April 2005. Latest EXE version 1.6.5.0 compiled 28 April 2022.

• 31 October 2022: Released updated wclocktz.ini file with changes for DST in Mexico - see Latest Time Zone File.
• 28 April 2022: Released version 1.6.45
• 4 May 2020: Released version 1.6.4.
• 2 May 2020: Released more up-to-date wclocktz.ini file.
• 28 August 2017: Released version 1.6.3
• 26 March 2017: Released version 1.6.2
• 8 February 2017: Released more up-to-date wclocktz.ini filea>.
• 23 July 2016: Released version 1.6.1 with updated timezone file
• 3 June 2015: Released version 1.6.0
• 22 May 2015: Released more up-to-date wclocktz.ini file.
• 1 June 2014: Released more up-to-date wclocktz.ini file.
• 6 December 2012: Released version 1.5.2.0.
• 4 January 2012: Released version 1.5.0.0.
• 2 January 2011: Released more up-to-date wclocktz.ini file.
• 5 December 2009: Version 1.4.2.1: minor fix for browser problem in some versions of XP.
• 3 December 2009: Released version 1.4.0.2 with digital signature and updated timezone data.
• 24 April 2009: Released version 1.4.0 with automatic notification of updates.
• 26 March 2009: Released more up-to-date wclocktz.ini file.
• 30 March 2008: Updated wclocktz.ini file to reflect daylight savings changes in Australia and New Zealand.
• 1 January 2008: New version 1.3.0. Shows date when mouse hovers over clock. Added Preferences option for auto-start.
• 4 February 2007: Fixed typo in wclocktz.ini for Baku.
• 2 February 2007: Version 1.2.0. Updated wclocktz.ini file to reflect USA 2007 changes and add new zones. Added 'Display all zones' menu option. Clock Properties now shows TZ string.
• 3 June 2006: Version 1.1.1. Minor fix to ensure changes to clock position enables Save Settings option.
• 21 May 2006: Fixed installation program to make sure program is not running when un-installing.
• 29 March 2006: Version 1.1.0. Fixed INI file/hard-coded TZ values issue.
• 30 April 2005: Version 1.0.0. Wclock first published.

Acknowledgements

Time zone handling

The time zone handling code in 'tz.c' is derived from public domain software 'localtime.c' originally written by Arthur David Olson (version 7.91, downloaded April 2005).

Installation program

The installation program was created using NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) available from http://nsis.sourceforge.net/.

Executable compression

The executable was compressed using UPX, the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables available from http://upx.sourceforge.net. (Sorry, guys, it triggered too many false positives with the not-so-good anti-virus programs)

Contact us

Any comments, feedback, questions please send us a message.

This page last updated: 31 October 2022