Introducing TellThemWhen

Thu Sep 09 15:44:00 -0700 2010

I have had a scratch I have wanted to itch for a long time, and that is about how to share times online. TellThemWhen is my solution to this problem.

The problem TellThemWhen is trying to solve is one of “How do I tell Bob over in another time zone, what time I want them to do something”. Now, in many cases, Bob might be a person you deal with all the time, and you know he is 9 hours behind you, tomorrow, so all you have to do is the mental arithmetic once. Simple (yeah, right).

But what about when you have a Maintenance window coming up? What do you tell all your customers? Probably, like many sites out there, you go: “Hi there, we will be doing maintenance at 1am EST for 15 minutes”, but what is EST? If you are in Australia, it means time on the East Coast, if you are in the USA, it means something totally different.

Some sites solve this by linking to the world clock. Which is all well and good, but, honestly, a bit rude. Why are you making me hunt around a massive page of time zones to find the one I am closest to?

So what was needed was a simple way for anyone to make an instant in time, and then share that with the world. TellThemWhen does this.

The above maintenance window could include a link to TellThemWhen for the downtime, and now your users, in whatever time zone they are in, will get the time, for them, in their timezone.

Neat.

Over the weeks I’ll be blogging about some of the technology behind TellThemWhen. Handling multiple timezones is sometimes a challenge and TellThemWhen handles it in some interesting ways. Checking on up to three different sources for the timezone data, and then also verifying with your local computer that what we guessed is correct.

So anyway, check it out. It was fun making it with my designer, David Cruikshank (@thedav3 on twitter) and stay tuned for more features to come!

blogLater

Mikel

  1. yecomlais Says:
    Tue Nov 08 19:31:13 -0800 2011

    Isn’t that why we always do such things in UTC?

  2. Oleg Keene Says:
    Thu Sep 09 20:03:16 -0700 2010

    Good idea! time zones difference become a problem in big team, such tool really helps. thanks

  3. Devdas Bhagat Says:
    Fri Sep 10 01:50:42 -0700 2010

    Isn’t that why we always do such things in UTC?

  4. Mikel Lindsaar Says:
    Fri Sep 10 05:57:05 -0700 2010

    @Devdas yes, you can do UTC, but then, the other person still has to calculate the time in their head. And when you are setting up meetings with many people, some of which only have a broad understand of timezones, then telling the time in UTC does not always help :)

  5. Best Reviews Says:
    Fri Oct 07 00:44:40 -0700 2011

    TellThemWhen is a good ideea. I do not think there is another site that offers this service.

  6. simon Says:
    Thu Dec 29 22:40:06 -0800 2011

    I am appreciating it very much! Looking forward to another great blog. Good luck to the author! all the best!
    chefs clothing

  7. simon Says:
    Thu Dec 29 22:40:36 -0800 2011

    I am appreciating it very much! Looking forward to another great blog. Good luck to the author! all the best!
    chefs clothing

Leave a Reply