World Clock

Flash Clocks' World Clock displays the time and flag for a number of cities around the world on an interactive daylight map on your Windows desktop. It's good looking and easy to use, too. For example, you can add and remove time zones and cities simply by clicking on the map, and even toggle visual effects on and off. New features include an Embed Tag for super-easy embedding in Web sites, presentations, and other programs, plus an improved and more accurate solar terminator. This portable freeware is ready for Windows 8. It requires Adobe Flash Player.

World Clock is a portable Flash app, so we saved it to a memorable location and clicked it to start the clock display. We could resize the app's Flash Player widow to keep it small on the desktop, and then simply grab the map with the cursor to change the location and zoom in with our mouse wheel. The app displays the familiar daylight map, a world map with nighttime areas shown under a bell-shaped shadow that moves along with the terminator, the sharp edge between day and night as viewed from space. Major cities are illuminated in the night view, though we could toggle both the terminator shadow and city markers on and off from a small suite of controls that also let us zoom in and out (the scroll wheel does this, too) and display national flags over tagged cities. The Settings let us change the program's theme colors. Cities are listed in a pop-up, but you can't add a city if it's not already included.

World Clock's quick interactive features, attractive display, and general good performance make it an interesting choice for tracking time around the world. While we'd like the ability to specify cities not listed in World Clock, we do like being able to quickly add and remove time zones from the eight available spots. World Clock is a great alternative to more elaborate (and sometimes costly) programs or desktop widgets.