If you know people who live in other countries, or you conduct business on an international level, you need to take into account what time it is in other parts of the world. Windows own clock can be configured to display the time in different time zones, and while this is a functional solution, it is not the most attractive one. EarthTime is, however, a very attractive program for monitoring worldwide time with a wonderful GUI.

The application takes a very visual approach to things, presenting you with a map of the world topped with a series of common cities. Clicking any of these location names will highlight that city of the map, and you can already see what the local time is. The map itself is pulled in in real time and shows you cloud coverage based on current weather data.

There is fairly extensive scope for customization, starting off with the city list that appears at the top of the program window. If there are only a few cities that you are interested in tracking, you may well not want to be distracted by any others. Head to the settings screen and you can add and remove locations as required. Colors can also be customized and there is an attractive full screen mode which can be used almost like a screensaver.

Another useful feature of the program is the ability to set alarms. This in itself may sound like nothing special, but there is a slight twist. You may well want to be notified when it is morning on the other side of the world so you can make a phone call at a reasonable hour. Rather than having to work out how far ahead or behind that country is and setting an alarm in your local time, you can instead select a foreign city and set an alarm using its local time.