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Bug 688360 - Put timezones/cities back on a map
Put timezones/cities back on a map
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 740786
Product: gnome-clocks
Classification: Applications
Component: world clock
0.1.x
Other Linux
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: Clocks maintainer(s)
Clocks maintainer(s)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2012-11-15 02:52 UTC by Jean-François Fortin Tam
Modified: 2015-01-02 15:55 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: ---


Attachments
Nice old applet (5.41 KB, image/png)
2013-04-03 12:00 UTC, Matěj Týč
Details
silly mockup (151.88 KB, image/png)
2015-01-02 15:41 UTC, Jean-François Fortin Tam
Details

Description Jean-François Fortin Tam 2012-11-15 02:52:17 UTC
So, the gnome2 clock applet was pretty awesome, and I loved it very much, but we can do much better.

Currently, gnome-clocks is a very nice app, except for one major nitpick I have: the world clocks mode shows cities as unsexy squares on a grid. This is not terribly space-efficient and also lacks a little bit of "oomph".

I'm surprised to not have seen proposals, in the design wiki page or in bug reports, to use an earth map display instead (we don't need to worry about cities/colonies on other planets yet).

Basically, have a bunch of (editable) points on the map with a label saying the  city name and a label saying the time (and "tomorrow" or "yesterday", just like the current gnome-clocks implementation).

Benefits of this approach include:
- Spatial memory. Yes, my mind works with planetary coordinates. It is faster for my eye to look at particular point of the map than to think "oh yes, so Bob lives near this big city called..."
- No more scrolling
- Hopefully (re)scalable to always fill the window dimensions
- Removes the need for icons to display each city's day/night state. Only one daylight overlay on the whole map.
- SEXINESS.


Possible ways to implement it:
- Reuse (and possibly improve) the timezones widget that is used in gnome-control-center's "Date & time" panel (that widget is also used in Fedora's installer, and quite possibly in others)
- Otherwise, use libchamplain to draw the map and the points on top of it

If you think the idea is worth investigating, I would be happy to make a mockup if you need one.
Comment 1 Matěj Týč 2013-04-03 12:00:01 UTC
Created attachment 240472 [details]
Nice old applet

converted to 16 color mode to reduce size
Comment 2 Matěj Týč 2013-04-03 12:01:54 UTC
I absolutely aggree. Having a map was nice, you could see how much of daylight you had left and whether you are already in the middle of the night.

It was also cool to observe how the daylight/night zones were changing throughout the year.

I think that this is a very simple and elegant solution, so please provide some feedback why it has disappeared or what can one do to help reintroduce this functionality to Gnome 3.
Comment 3 Allan Day 2015-01-02 12:12:48 UTC
Displaying cities on a world map is a reasonable thing to do in a clocks app, and there are examples of apps that do just that [1]. There are some obvious advantages, and I've personally thought about it as an option.

There are a few things that made me decide against a map though. First, you generally end up needing to show the city in two locations in the UI - once for the map, and once for the time. That's not particularly elegant.

Second, I seem to recall some tricky layout issues with showing a world map inside a resizable window, particularly when you consider portrait displays.

I agree that the world clocks view needs to be more interesting, and the approach we've been trying to pursue is to use images of cities (bug 681358). There are also some ideas for improving the general layout of this view (bug 740786).

[1] http://cdn7.whealmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/ios7_ipad_clock.png?3b00b5
Comment 4 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2015-01-02 13:12:53 UTC
Well I was proposing to have only the map with the labels onto the points, not have a duplicated list of clocks besides the map, which would be a bit silly in my view. Doesn't that solve the core issue you have with that approach?
Comment 5 Allan Day 2015-01-02 14:36:26 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> Well I was proposing to have only the map with the labels onto the points, not
> have a duplicated list of clocks besides the map, which would be a bit silly in
> my view.

It's rather hard to guess all the details of what you have in mind. If you want to post mockups then please do so. I will say this though - this view should primarily be about the time, rather than geography.

> Doesn't that solve the core issue you have with that approach?

Can't really say until the details are worked out... there's still the more general question of whether a map is better than city images, of course. I personally feel that the latter is more elegant and visually engaging.
Comment 6 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2015-01-02 15:41:35 UTC
Created attachment 293608 [details]
silly mockup

So, just to prove myself wrong, I toyed around a few mins to make this mockup... and then mostly came to the conclusion that the map approach indeed can't work. Just throwing the labels onto their geo locations will create a giant furball (obviously), and my "pointers" idea shown in this mockup ends up not working either (though I purposedly pushed it to the extreme, by packing a lot of timezones into a small window area).
Comment 7 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2015-01-02 15:55:01 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 740786 ***