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 7 and Windows Vista sidebar. It elegantly displays the current date and time (with optional time zone). The clock can automatically change color based on the sunrise and sunset times of the selected timezone.

Install gadget now (v1.48)!

(Note: Internet Explorer may download this as a .zip file; if this happens, please rename it to .gadget before running.)

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

See pictures of how other people use Presto's Sidebar Clock on Flickr (email me with your picture if you would like to share!).

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

Bug Reports

Please scroll down to the Frequently Asked Questions first and check if there's already an answer to your question.

If you still need help, please fill out the bug submission form.

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 donors 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, Rich Armstrong, John Sietsma, Rob Hawkes, and Lo Yuk Fai.

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. The clock can also automatically dim at sunset.

The following characters are supported differently than what is documented on the PHP date function web site:

e: Not supported
I: Not supported
J: Julian date (same as "z" but starting at 1 instead of 0)
o: Not supported
Q: Shows difference between local time zone and the clock's time zone
T: Not supported
u: Not supported
V: Same as "W" but adds 1 to the work week number

Any of the time and date format codes can be used in either the "Date format" or "Time format" fields.

The time and date format codes are also supported in the bottom label field but must be escaped with a "\" character. For example, "Berlin \H:\i" would result in "Berlin 14:27".

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.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I change the way the time or date looks?
Here is a list of the codes that control how the date and time appear. You can get this list by clicking "Format help" from the options.

None of the codes do what I want. Check the additional codes listed above to see if what you want is already available. If it isn't, contact me and tell me what you're looking for.

How do I display the sunrise or sunset time on the clock?
Displaying the sunrise or sunset time is not currently supported. If sunrise information is available for the selected timezone, the clock can dim the color of the clock when it is night time. Support for displaying the sunrise and sunset times themselves will be coming in a future version.

What's up with the strange time zone names?
The technical reason is that I use the zoneinfo project for my time zone information. It provides information by city name.

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 turn off 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! Go to the settings, click on the appearance tab, and select the browse button at the bottom to load a background image from your hard disk. A kind person from Slovakia provided a nice gray background image if you need one.

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.

How do I get multiple clocks to be closer to each other on the desktop?
By default, Windows 7 snaps gadgets to a grid pattern with a wide spacing. Hold down the shift key while moving the gadget to allow the gadget to be placed anywhere.

The gadget does not start automatically when Windows starts.
This is a Windows Sidebar problem. The clock has no control over when or how it is loaded. See this thread for tips on how to repair the sidebar.

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

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