The latest update to Catfood Earth includes a sophisticated time zone layer:
Catfood Desktate supports simple time zones by (optionally) displaying 24 clocks across the top of the image. In Catfood Earth I wanted to add a layer with greater accuracy.
The new layer adds color to show the current time around the world. By default the colors are added to each country in the image with color codes clocks that show the current time in each zone. You can also add color to the rest of the map as well. Click the image above for a more detailed view.
What won't be immediately obvious is that the layer is updated when a country changes time zone, i.e. switching to or from daylight savings. Whenever this happens the layer is updated so that the color coding remains accurate throughout the year.
Making the new time zone layer involved a lot of data. I'm indebted to Eric Muller for his time zone shapefile, the tz database and the zoneinfo project. In the course of processing the data I wrote and released an open source library for parsing ERSI Shapefiles.
This is still a work in progress, especially the default color scheme. Please give the time zone layer a try and provide me with feedback - preferably in comments below, alternatively send me a email.
Download Catfood Earth Beta from the original blog post. Remember that I'm still giving away free licenses if you provide feedback on the beta.