June 26, 2000

I went looking for downloadable time-zone + daylight saving data for an application, and found a few useful things. NationalAtlas.gov has FTP'able shape files for maps of many kinds. GeoCommunity has time zone shapefiles released under the GPL. For the silly, here's a big-ass JPEG time zone map. But shapefiles and maps don't help; I'm looking for something that could be in, say, a drop-down menu of time zone names (possibly with example location names in the zone).

TimeZoneConverter.com has bunches of interactive resources but no data sets; their reference card option can print a particular time in the current day in a chart with all zones and DS info, but there's no way to get the full dataset. The Date and Time Gateway is another. Time.gov gives official U.S. time in any time zone (with DS), but I need global data.

The JavaScript World Clock Zannah linked to recently comes the closest for providing a data set, with its data in the JS source code. The index isn't as useful (just places, not zone names), but it might be good enough, if it's accurate.

While WorldTimeZone.com is another interactive app with no datasets, it seems the easiest to steal from if I wanted. (Mine is a small non-commerical app, so I'm not above stealing.) Elabtorate maps available; large downloads but nice (if a bit cheesily designed).