Phrenopolis Apps

This app implements International Color Time,which is a slightly silly but effective standard, intended toeliminate the confusion that accompanies trying to coordinate phonecalls or other activities with people who live in other time zonesaround the world. Instead of trying to figure out what time it issomewhere else and whether we mean five o'clock my time or fiveo'clock your time, we both use a GLOBAL clock that's the SAMEEVERYWHERE, and save ourselves a lot of hassle.Why bother with this, and why use color, you may ask? If you'reunsure, consider this excerpt from the ICT Manifesto:It's hard to keep track of how many hours the time gap isbetween where you're standing and where your overseas distributoris located, whether you're speaking in terms of your local time ortheirs, and whether to add or subtract the difference when figuringout what your watch should say when you make the call. It's worseif either or both of you happen to be traveling, which isincreasingly the case now that we all have cell phones, and thefact that there's also Daylight Saving Time which starts and endson different days in different countries makes things enormouslycomplicated. Some of us waste a lot of time trying to clarify thesedetails (and then we screw it up anyway).Wouldn't it be nice, and much simpler, if we could all agree onwhat time it was, all over the world? At first I thought we shouldjust use unaltered Greenwich Mean Time for everything and call it aday. I'd be all right with that, frankly. Computers do it. The onlyproblem is that we've all become accustomed to having certainnumbers line up with certain parts of the day, and having the clock"roll over" in the middle of the night (and also at mid-day ifyou're using the 12-hour system). To move the numbers feelspeculiar, and to change them more for some people than for othersfeels unfair.This is an inherent problem with any time marking system thatuses numbers, or letters, or anything else where there is ahierarchy and a point where you return to the beginning. What wouldbe better is a time marking system that forms a natural loopwithout feeling like it has any particular beginning or end, andwithout us having habitual expectations about which part of thecycle lines up with which part of the day. That's where the colorwheel comes in.We can simply decide that at some particular point, the time is"orange," everywhere on the planet. Later on it will be yellow,green, teal, blue, maroon, and so on, and eventually orange again.In my part of the world, people tend to wake up in the blue range,eat lunch around lavender and get off work at orange, but elsewhereit may be that you wake up at yellow and have dinner at purple.Neither seems to make more sense than the other, which is exactlythe point. And then if we want to have a phone call, we can arrangeto speak at thirty minutes past indigo, and there is no confusionabout exactly when that means.And so I decided to implement this clock, as an arbitrarystandard for coordinating time around the globe.(My 4000 characters are about used up – if you want to know whyTHIS clock is better than OTHER clocks based on color, read thefull manifesto at phrenopolis.com (also included in the app foryour convenience).This version of the app differs from the free version in that ithas no ads, includes a (super-cool)touch-to-translate-to-local-time feature, and has some additionalclock faces and text size options.

(Free, ad-supported version.)This app implements International Color Time, which is aslightly silly but effective standard, intended to eliminate theconfusion that accompanies trying to coordinate phone calls orother activities with people who live in other time zones aroundthe world. Instead of trying to figure out what time it issomewhere else and whether we mean five o'clock my time or fiveo'clock your time, we both use a GLOBAL clock that's the SAMEEVERYWHERE, and save ourselves a lot of hassle.Why bother with this, and why use color, you may ask? If you'reunsure, consider this excerpt from the ICT Manifesto:It's hard to keep track of how many hours the time gap isbetween where you're standing and where your overseas distributoris located, whether you're speaking in terms of your local time ortheirs, and whether to add or subtract the difference when figuringout what your watch should say when you make the call. It's worseif either or both of you happen to be traveling, which isincreasingly the case now that we all have cell phones, and thefact that there's also Daylight Saving Time which starts and endson different days in different countries makes things enormouslycomplicated. Some of us waste a lot of time trying to clarify thesedetails (and then we screw it up anyway).Wouldn't it be nice, and much simpler, if we could all agree onwhat time it was, all over the world? At first I thought we shouldjust use unaltered Greenwich Mean Time for everything and call it aday. I'd be all right with that, frankly. Computers do it. The onlyproblem is that we've all become accustomed to having certainnumbers line up with certain parts of the day, and having the clock"roll over" in the middle of the night (and also at mid-day ifyou're using the 12-hour system). To move the numbers feelspeculiar, and to change them more for some people than for othersfeels unfair.This is an inherent problem with any time marking system thatuses numbers, or letters, or anything else where there is ahierarchy and a point where you return to the beginning. What wouldbe better is a time marking system that forms a natural loopwithout feeling like it has any particular beginning or end, andwithout us having habitual expectations about which part of thecycle lines up with which part of the day. That's where the colorwheel comes in.We can simply decide that at some particular point, the time is"orange," everywhere on the planet. Later on it will be yellow,green, teal, blue, maroon, and so on, and eventually orange again.In my part of the world, people tend to wake up in the blue range,eat lunch around lavender and get off work at orange, but elsewhereit may be that you wake up at yellow and have dinner at purple.Neither seems to make more sense than the other, which is exactlythe point. And then if we want to have a phone call, we can arrangeto speak at thirty minutes past indigo, and there is no confusionabout exactly when that means.And so I decided to implement this clock, as an arbitrarystandard for coordinating time around the globe.(My 4000 characters are about used up – if you want to know whyTHIS clock is better than OTHER clocks based on color, read thefull manifesto at phrenopolis.com (also included in the app foryour convenience).