ActiveEarth

If you have relatives that immigrated to a distant country, it may be difficult to figure out when to call them, especially during the first few months, due to the time difference. You can place an additional clock on your desktop, but a better solution is to use ActiveEarth. Besides displaying the time in several cities from around the world, it also shows you graphical representations of time differences, the current weather conditions and much more. The software can suit your needs, regardless if you have relatives or business partners in other countries or if you are just interested to see how the world works.

You can use the software free of charge for 30 days, without encountering any locked features. It can be installed in a matter of seconds and it does not have any special requirements.

ActiveEarth comes with a modern user interface, which has glassy looks on Windows 7 and Vista. It consists of a map of the world, which can be set to a Latlon or Robinson projection or displayed as a rotatable globe. It is also possible to zoom on individual continents.

You can find a large selection of tools, on separate tabs, beneath the map. The software displays a number of clocks by default, but you can remove them and add your own clocks, for any city you want. You can search for a city in the program's library, search for it on the Internet or add it manually, by specifying its name, country, time zone and map coordinates.

Added cities appear on the map with labels, which can be customized. Their corresponding clocks can be found on the first tab, in the lower region of the interface and you can customize them as well. Besides clocks, you can find other useful features as well. The time difference tool consists of two overlapping bars, which make it easy to figure out the current time in two cities of your choice. You can also figure out if it's morning, noon or dusk, from the colors on the bars.

Other tools display various details about individual cities, like the sunrise time, daylight duration and others. You can also view a city's current weather conditions and set up one or more countdown timers. The software provides a series of miscellaneous tools and charts. You can view an annual solar chart for each city, time differences between all cities on the map, as well as the current and future moon phases. Additionally, ActiveEarth allows you to calculate the time between two dates, in years, months, weeks and so on, down to milliseconds.