MultiClock Civil/Solar/Metric vs Metric Seconds Usage & Stats
The clock shows two different times in several different ways.
Civil time is the current time in your time zone, taking daylight saving rules into account.
Solar time depends on the position of the sun in the sky. Solar noon is when the sun is at its highest point. That moment depends on where you are, and on where the Earth is in its annual orbit around the sun.
The time display shows hours and minutes in the way you're used to. It also shows a metric time. It breaks the day into 10,000 equal-sized pieces and keeps count of them over the course of the day. Midnight is 0000, and 9999 is the instant just before the next midnight.
It also shows a progress bar for the percent of day elapsed.
The clock shows sunrise and sunset times for both civil and solar days, in the hour and minute display and in metric.
There's a "classic" display page that shows just solar metric, civil metric and civil hh:mm time.
There's a converter page that allows you to type in a time, civil or solar, hours:minutes or metric, and convert to all the other available time types.
- Apple App Store
- Free
- Utilities
Store Rank
- -
Sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, seven days per week. When you’re trying to do math with time, it’s hard. Metric Seconds is easy. Use this app to convert time to and from metric, and to tell and measure time in metric.
Metric seconds is time measured in seconds using the standard metric units that are easy. The zero point is midnight January 1, 1970, the "start of time" for UNIX and other computer systems. And there are no time zones in metric time, it's all UTC-based.
In metric time, seconds are the base unit. Then the regular metric multipliers are used: kilo, Mega, Giga, etc. We can use “hecto” for 100 seconds to have something close to a minute. Kiloseconds, 1000 seconds, are about 16 minutes long so 3.6 ksec is an hour and 86.4 ksec is a day.
Science fiction has used metric time. Some examples are Vernor Vinge’s books A Fire on the Deep and Deepness in the Sky and Charles Stross’s books Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Neptune’s Brood. Also Robert Forward and Iain M. Banks used metric time.
We won't abandon minutes and hours anytime soon. We’re all used to them. We won't start saying things like “I’ll be right with you, give me a hectosec.” For doing math with time or doing scientific and engineering measurements, kiloseconds, Megaseconds, and Gigaseconds might just make a lot of sense. And trying something new is fun.
- Apple App Store
- Free
- Utilities
Store Rank
- -
MultiClock Civil/Solar/Metric VS. 
Metric SecondsDecember 19, 2024