Windows Gadget: Presto's Sidebar Clock
A Vista/Windows 7 gadget to elegantly display the current date and time (with optional time zone support).
FeedbackBy Preston Hunt, 08 April 2007

Overview

Presto's Sidebar Clock is a gadget for the Windows Vista and Windows 7 sidebar. It elegantly displays the current date and time (with optional time zone information).

Install gadget now (v1.39)!

21 supported languages: Afrikaans, Български, Čeština, 简体中文, Dansk, Deutsch, English, Español, Français, Italiano, Lietuvių, Magyar, Mакедонски, Nederlands, Polski, Português, Русский, Slovenščina, Srpski, Svenska, українська.

E-mail me if you are interested in providing translations for other languages!

Charityware

Presto's Sidebar Clock is Charityware. You can use and copy it as much as you like, but you are encouraged to help the less fortunate of the world through a donation to UNICEF. After you have made your donation, please e-mail me your name so I can add your name to the donators list (and know that my gadget is appreciated!).

Thanks to the following generous individuals who have shown their appreciation for Presto's Sidebar Clock by contributing to UNICEF: Jim Baker, Dave Horne, Diane Koyich, Matt Halls, and Rich Armstrong.

Background

On WinXP, I was always very dissatisfied with the default system clock. My biggest complaint was that it didn't display the date unless you hovered the cursor over the time or made the start bar super wide. So I found a shareware program called TClockEx that installs a customizable clock in the lower right hand corner.

TClockEx was perfect for my needs, unless I traveled internationally. In this case, I wanted to display multiple time zones at once, so I ended up using a pay program called Zone Tick.

When I first installed Vista, I used the default clock and date widgets that Microsoft has provided. However, they consume too much screen real estate for my tastes. Further, while I have no problem with analog clocks in the real world, I like a digital clock for my computer desktop.

None of the digital clock gadgets available met my requirements for simplicity and elegance, and Presto's Sidebar Clock was born...

Features

In addition to offering a completely customizable date and time format (using the same format as PHP's date function) it also supports an optional time zone offset and time zone label. By simply dragging multiple copies of the clock to your sidebar, you can have two or more time zones displayed simultaneously.

Acknowledgments

This gadget uses Svend Tofte's excellent formatDate JavaScript code to do the date and time formatting. Special thanks to Svend for releasing his useful code to the public domain.

It also uses the pytz package to compute the time zone offsets for all of the cities for both standard and daylight time. The time zone files upon which pytz is based are changing all the time, Stuart Bishop does a great job of constantly updating pytz.

Screenshots

Please feel free to send me screenshots of how you use Presto's Sidebar Clock. I'll post them here!

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the time zone for India?
Please select Asia/Calcutta or Asia/New Delhi.

Where is the time zone for China?
Please select Asia/Shanghai.

Why don't you use time zone names, such as Eastern/Pacific/etc. for the U.S. or other countries?
The technical reason is that I use the zoneinfo project for my time zone information. It provides information by city name. I also happen to agree with their naming convention, so there is very little chance that I will ever release a version that uses U.S. time zone names.

Do you have support for Julian dates in the date format string?
Use uppercase "J" in the date format string to get Julian date. This is the same as "z" but starting at 1 instead of 0.

I just want to display the date. Is there any way to suppress the time?
If you want to suppress the time, it's possible to enter the date format codes in the time format box. For example, you could put "M j" for the date format and "D" for the time.

Can I change the background image?
Yes! Locate the following directory on your hard disk: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\prestosidebarclock-1.32.gadget\images. Change "username" to your login name and update the "prestosidebarclock-x.xx" to the current version number accordingly. Simply replace the file "background-black.png" with the background image you want to use.

Daylight saving just changed for my time zone, but the clock is still showing the old time.
Sometimes it takes up to 24 hours for the correct time to appear. Please wait a day before contacting me with a bug report (thanks!). Time zone rules do change frequently, please ensure that you are running the latest version of the clock.

How do I run multiple clocks?
Click the Windows Start menu and type "Gadget Gallery". When the gallery opens, simply drag as many clocks as you would like onto the desktop.

Release history

Enhancements

Depending on how popular the gadget is, I am considering adding a few enhancements.

The biggest one would be a mode where the background color of the clock would gradually cycle from blue to black based on the time of day, thereby providing a visual clue of day or night to the user. This is obvious for the current time zone, but can be helpful if multiple time zones are installed. A really cool implementation would download sunrise/sunset times for the specific city.

Please feel free to e-mail feature requests, bug reports, etc.! (Please check the list of existing bug reports and tickets first.)

Feature Requests From Users

Previous Versions