A small tool for time zone conversion

Posted on March 31, 2024, by Sébastien

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International Meeting Planner

I’m writing this short blog post to let you know about a small (unassuming) tool I've just written, to help you visualize suitable times for events involving multiple time zones.

“International Meeting Planner” screenshot

You can download it at:

https://codeberg.org/sebastien-mouchet/international-meeting-planner

It was loosely inspired by tools such as World Time Buddy:

https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/

Except, it’s more basic, and a lot uglier.

If it looks like a UI designed by a backend developer, that’s because it is 😁

> What’s the point, then?

There are multiple advantages:

There’s a dark theme,

There are no trackers,

It’s Open Source,

And more importantly, it works offline.

Just save the HTML file to your computer and open it in a Web browser.

OFFLFIRSOCH

> Say what?

OFFLFIRSOCH. It’s apparently pronounced “awful fur sock”.

It’s an idea from Solderpunk – the creator of the Gemini protocol – and it means “OFFLine-FIRst SOftware CHallenge”.

Announcing OFFLFIRSOCH 2024 (solderpunk)

> The spirit of OFFLFIRSOCH, in short, is […] to identify something which you yourself actually do online at least semi-regularly which you know full well could be done offline, and to make that happen.

That’s how I got the idea of developing this small utility.

Indeed, why send requests to a server when time zone conversions can be done entirely locally on your computer?

I found out about this “challenge” on March 29, and it ends on March 31 😅

Now, to be honest, I doubt my tool qualifies for the challenge, as it’s… a Web page! So much for “offline FIRST”.

I mean, it can definitely work 100% offline, but if anyone ever finds it useful, they’ll be tempted to host it on a server, which defeats the purpose of the entire thing.