Time Zone Friends is a time zone program which allows you to set up several friends (who could actually be friends, colleagues, family, companies or whatever you like) and with each friend you associate a standard Microsoft Windows™ time zone. This allows you to easily see the current time for each person and also allows you to more easily coordinate meetings with people across several time zones. Here is an example of a grid of time zones.

Setting up your first friend

To create a friend, simply hit the button ‘Add a Friend’ button. This will take you to this screen.

Enter the name of your friend in the Name box. In the grid you will see every standard time zone listed (as it is recorded in the Windows operating system). To quickly narrow down the search you can enter a time zone code (e.g. EET for Eastern European Standard Time) or one of the standard cities, and hit the button Filter Time Zone.

Now press the Select button to associate your friend with this standard time zone.

Finally press ok to finish editing your friend.

Setting the current friend

The current friend is normally set to yourself. For example, you might create a friend called ‘Me’ and give this person your time zone. To select a friend as the current friend, just click on the Select button in the main time zone friends grid.

Setting the time

You can set the time in two ways. You can forward plan the meeting to a specific date and time, in which case you can type the date and time in and then press the button Work Out Times. Alternatively you can simply press the button Use Current Time and the current time (with respect to the selected current friend and not your local PC time) will be copied into the time and date boxes.

How to find a time zone?

There are hundreds of towns and cities in the world and this web site does not provide any database to look them up. However it is almost always easy to find the correct ‘standard’ time zone by simply typing in “Time zone cityname” into Google and it will usually find a web page with the information on very quickly. You should then be to find the time zone in the standard time zones listed by Windows which covers almost every reasonable combination.

Special cases – Handling daylight savings time

As you may know, in many areas in the world, the local politics dictates that daylight savings of +1 hour come into force during the summer. This is by no means universal. So two countries in the same time zone may have daylight savings or may not. An example of this is Libya and Minsk in the EET (E. Europe Standard Time) time zone. To allow for this, we include the configuration option ‘Ignore Daylight Savings Time’ in the ‘Edit Friend’ screen.

You can configure two contacts in the same time zone but using a different daylight savings rule. They will appear like this in the main grid

Are the configuration options sufficient for all time zones

The simple answer is “I do not know”. I would hope that, as this is based on the Windows system, it is representative of every time zone configuration. The only issue might be some countries may operate slightly different daylight savings time rules, for the same time zone. If you have this problem, let me know and I can try to make this more configurable.