what sorts of background texts/sources of info did you use?

edit: i think i have the dover book your readme mentions :)

That’s actually pretty close to what I ended up building.

For the first one, I skipped the map and went with search + saved cities instead. All your saved places sit on the same 24-hour dial, so you can see the difference from your local time at a glance without doing the timezone math. The upside is that it works completely offline and fits nicely on Apple Watch too.

Your second suggestion is the part I only got halfway right. You can move the dial in 15-minute increments and the daylight/twilight colouring changes with it. There’s also a calendar where you can jump to any date and time and see what the solar state is in every saved city, but right now that’s shown in rows rather than by recolouring the clock itself.

I like your version better though, hovering/scrubbing a time and having the whole clock recolour for that moment would make a lot more sense. I’m going to add that to the list.

I’m the developer, btw: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6797192832

Dragging the globe around isn't working on touch; it feels like it's missing touch-action: none

interesting

I wish my browser let me do this by default. Rather than "let this site know your location?" it should be "select a location to give to this site".

(I'm sure there are extensions and/or developer options that do this, but it's the default I want)

You can set latitude and longitude after opening settings with the gear icon.

you can use my version sunsignal.app and enter a zip code.

The objective time of "local noon" also varies due to the Earth's orbit not being a perfect circle, and the Earth's axis being tilted with respect to the plane of its orbit. The variance is described by the equation of time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time

> Nope, not unless you are in the center of a timezone!

… and you do not live with daylight saving time.

I picture annual calendar the almost the same way (counterclockwise), although its an asymmetrical oval, and months have associated colors (i.e. December navy blue, January maroon/brown, February ice blue, March true maroon…August golden or wheat yellow). I don’t know why, but that’s been my mental image since childhood.

Interesting, I don’t have a circular mental image of the year at all. It’s more like a continuous line — the summers are light and the winters are dark(er) — where the previous year doesn’t coincide with the next year. Same for the week (and the month, but the months have different lengths anyway). Also not for the day, which takes two revolutions of the clock. Does anyone visualize the day as two circles? Probably not.

I visualize the year clockwise, but with summer at the top, and the new year at the 6 o'clock position. I'm not sure why, but I think it just makes more sense to me to think of spring as rising, and "fall" as descending. I guess that convention would work better in the southern hemisphere.

I actually have exactly a clock as a mental model of the year and the seasons. December is 12 o' clock.

But weirdly, I dont have a mind's clock to represent the day. Precisely because it feels to me that the clock shape is unfit to show time. Because 03:00am feels wildly different from 03:00pm. My mental representation is a 3d spiral slightly offset and looping back on itself. So imagine two clockfaces when looking from up top, seethrough. The bottom one is a bit to the left so you can see both well. Each consecutive number goes a bit higher. After 12 midnight the numbers quickly decend down back to 06:00am. I have this image for as long as.I remember.

Did you go to the same elementary school?

The “Solar Dial” face does pretty much what the site does.

This is already my default watch face on Apple Watch