OS X Dock

Internet Time Dockling for Mac OS X

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This is yet again another "Internet Time" beat clock which can be displayed continually on the user's desktop. This incarnation lives in the Mac OS X Dock. The Internet Time algorithm uses a Cocoa NSTimeZone object instead of an arithmetic calculation using seconds since the epoch.

The Beat value is easier to read at most dock magnifications, the dockling background color rotates through the HSV color model hue spectrum during a beat. The docking menu shows the user's current date/time, the UTC date/time , and an Internet date/Time stamp. Each of these menu items is copied to OS X clipboard when selected. NB: This only works in OS X, not from the Classic environment.

The Internet day/time stamp, "2001 255@839.4", is an invention based on both common sense and e-mail discussions I have had with other developers of Internet Time clocks. The year is the first four digits, followed by a space, the next three digits are the zero-based day of year. The Internet Time Beat follows and can be represented as a decimal number to the desired precision, I use tenth of a beat precision.

This dockling was derived from the source code for "WebTime" by Cyril Godefroy which in turn was based on work by Eric Peyton.



Download InternetTime.dmg.gz

Click to download, uncompress, mount the resulting InternetTime.dmg file, drag and drop the docking to /Applications/Dock Extras, then drag and drop the docking to the Dock. (Revised )

What is Internet Time?

The following explanation of Internet Time was derived from Swatch Time web pages at Swatch.com

Internet Time represents a completely new global concept of time. So what's the deal?

Basically, the Internet Beat, the revolutionary new unit of time means the following:

How long is an Internet beat? In short, a day is divided into 1000 "Beats". One Internet beat is the equivalent of 1 minute 26.4 seconds. That means that 12 noon in Switzerland in the old time system is the equivalent of @500 Internet Beats.

Okay, so how can a surfer in New York, or a passenger on a transatlantic flight know when it is @500 Internet Beats in Central Europe for example? How can the New York surfer make a date for a chat with his cyber friend in Rome? Easy, Internet Time is the same all over the world.

How is this possible? We are not just creating a new way of measuring time, we are also creating a new meridian in Biel, Switzerland, home of Swatch. Biel Mean Time (BMT) will be the universal reference for Internet Time. A day in Internet Time begins at midnight BMT (@000 Internet Beats) (Central European Wintertime).

The meridian is marked for all to see on the facade of the Swatch International Headquarters on Jakob-Staempfli Street, Biel, Switzerland. So it is the same time all over the world, be it night or day, the era of time zones has disappeared.

The BMT meridian was inaugurated on 23 October 1998 in the presence of Nicholas Negroponte, founder and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory.

Swatch's Internet Time Converter, click here

A Brief History of Time (Zones)?

If you think the notion of a single, world wide, time zone is unecessary or foolish, read about the relatively recent (1847 in Britain, in the US in 1918) invention of Standard Time Zone which was created because people were interacting with each other over greater distances via some new technologies, railroads and telegraph systems.

Over the past 100 years, our communications technogies have transcended the use a time zones. Before the internet it was only necessary to know the time zone nearest your location for telephone calls. The internet has brought us instance world wide communication and coordination. Thus "Internet Time" is simply the extention of the concept of a uniform time to it ultimate conclusion.

--will gilbert

The following is based on information obtained at the Daylight Saving Time site:

http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/d.html

This site has some excellent images to go along with the text reproduced here.

First there was local time

For millennia, people have measured time based on the position of the sun - it was noon when the sun was highest in the sky. Sundials were used well into the Middle Ages, when mechanical clocks began to appear. Cities would set their town clock by measuring the position of the sun, but every city would be on a slightly different time.

Standard time begins in Britain

Britain was the first country to set the time throughout a region to one standard time. The railways cared most about the inconsistencies of local mean time, and they forced a uniform time on the country. The original idea was credited to Dr. William Hyde Wollaston (1766-1828) and was popularized by Abraham Follett Osler (1808-1903). The first railway to adopt London time was the Great Western Railway in November 1840; other railways followed suit, and by 1847 most (though not all) railways used London time. On September 22, 1847 the Railway Clearing House, an industry standards body, recommended that GMT be adopted at all stations as soon as the General Post Office permitted it. The transition occurred on 12-01 for the L&NW, the Caledonian, and presumably other railways; the January 1848 Bradshaw's lists many railways as using GMT. By 1855 the vast majority of public clocks in Britain were set to GMT (though some, like the great clock on Tom Tower at Christ Church, Oxford, were fitted with two minute hands, one for local time and one for GMT). The last major holdout was the legal system, which stubbornly stuck to local time for many years, leading to oddities like polls opening at 08:13 and closing at 16:13. The legal system finally switched to GMT when the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act took effect; it received the Royal Assent on August, 2, 1880.

Standard time in the US

Standard time in time zones was instituted in the U.S. and Canada by the railroads on 18 November 1883. Before then, time of day was a local matter, and most cities and towns used some form of local solar time, maintained by some well-known clock (for example, on a church steeple or in a jeweler's window). The new standard time system was not immediately embraced by all, however.

Detroit kept local time until 1900 when the City Council decreed that clocks should be put back twenty-eight minutes to Central Standard Time. Half the city obeyed, half refused. After considerable debate, the decision was rescinded and the city reverted to Sun time. A derisive offer to erect a sundial in front of the city hall was referred to the Committee on Sewers. Then, in 1905, Central time was adopted by city vote.

Use of standard time gradually increased because of its obvious practical advantages for communication and travel. Standard time in time zones was not established in U.S. law until the Standard Time Act of 1918 enacted on March 19.

Time zones were first used by the railroads in 1883 to standardize their schedules. Canada's Sir Sanford Fleming also played a key role in the development of a worldwide system of keeping time. Trains had made obsolete the old system where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions. Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard or mean time and hourly variations from that according to established time zones. He was instrumental in convening an International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884 at which the system of international standard time -- still in use today -- was adopted.

In 1918, Congress adopted standard time zones based on those set up by the railroads, and gave the responsibility to make any changes in the time zones to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the only federal transportation regulatory agency at the time. When Congress created the Department of Transportation in 1966, it transferred the responsibility for the time laws to the new department.

Time zone boundaries have changed greatly since their original introduction and changes still occasionally occur. The Department of Transportation conducts rulemakings to consider requests for changes. Generally, time zone boundaries have tended to shift westward. Places on the eastern edge of a time zone can effectively move sunset an hour later (by the clock) by shifting to the time zone immediately to their east. If they do so, the boundary of that zone is locally shifted to the west; the accumulation of such changes results in the long-term westward trend. The process is not inexorable, however, since the late sunrises experienced by such places during the winter may be regarded as too undesirable. Furthermore, under the law, the principal standard for deciding on a time zone change is the "convenience of commerce." Proposed time zone changes have been both approved and rejected based on this criterion, although most such proposals have been accepted.