This could be good for kids to learn how to read analog clocks. I remember this being something we did in school as kids... racing to read a clock faster than the other kid, to move on to the next section of an obstacle course. From what I understand that is becoming a lost skill.
Ten years ago the kids across the street from us (who were 9-10 at the time) would ask the time, and I’d show them my watch. They’d still ask what time it was because they couldn’t read the analog face on my watch.
The oldest is in college now. Next time I see her, I’ll ask if she ever learned to read an analog face.
> kids to learn how to read analog clocks [...] From what I understand that is becoming a lost skill.
I don't think kids need to learn to read analog clocks anymore, in the same way that we don't teach kids to use slide rules. Technology has advanced enough that analog clocks have joined polaroid cameras and vinyl records in the "obsolete technology that some people use for nostalgia or fashion" category.
(for the record, I grew up with analog clocks and I am fully fluent in using them.)
> Technology has advanced enough that analog clocks have joined polaroid cameras and vinyl records
assumption digital 'more advanced' than analog.
unclear. How digital more 'advanced'? Is regression, not advance.
Analog watch. See gap between minute hand and start of meeting. See gap get smaller. Instant.
Colleague in different time zone? See hour hand -3 steps, faster than "14 - 3 is 11". If digital even have 24 hr time, many no.
Teach kids. Analog visible, easy to read, child can see. Child can turn hands on wooden clock, manipulate. Now plus 1 hour, now plus 1.5 hours. Move long hand forward 1 rotation, 1.5 rotations.
Digital? Teach kids "now plus 90 minutes" digital? Hard math. now plus 90 is now (hour) plus 1 and now (minute) plus 30. Teach kids "now minus 10". Does hour change? Why hour change? why now hour different from now minute? daddy daddy what about now seconds? All abstract, cannot touch. Daddy why move hour number first?
Digital. 1 on microwave less than 99. Where else in world 1 < 99 makes sense? Digital time math crazy.
The technology I was thinking of was digital screens. Analog clocks made sense when the best you could do was attach some arrows to some gears on a rotating shaft. Now we can individually toggle lights in a grid containing millions of lights.
> Digital. 1 on microwave less than 99. Where else in world 1 < 99 makes sense? Digital time math crazy.
This isn't anything to do with digital time, it's just a convenience of recent microwaves. The digital microwaves of the 1990s did not have this feature, but they were still digital. If you input 1, you just got 1 second.
On microwaves that do have this feature, set the power first to bypass it.
There are still analog clocks all over the place in public spaces. Sure, a person probably has their phone on them, but it seems strange that people wouldn't want to know how to read them instead of just seeing them as weird slowly moving art installations.
Analog clocks also have the benefit of being able to better visualize time. A lot of people with ADHD talk about time blindness. One common thing sold to them are analog countdown timers that look like a big pie chart. An analog watch effectively does the same thing, especially a dive watch. The user can see how much time they have instead of needing to calculate it and try to translate that into some kind of meaning. Rarely does anyone need to know the exact time, and the analog clock shines at giving an approximate time quickly, to see progress, without actually ever having to know what time it is. A progress bar for the day, if you will.
One of my favorite watches is one with a single hand and a 24-hour dial. I like it for weekends and vacation. I want a watch, I want to know roughly where I'm at in the day, but I don't want to stress about the minutes.
Watches and clocks just aren't ageing out as quickly as so much other tech. Analog watches also have the advantage of being able to so someone why our clocks are the way they are, by comparing them to solar clocks.
Also it would be a bit to close to Futurama to see e.g. Big Ben get a digital overhaul.
Analog clocks are still being taught in schools, at least partially, for their mathematical education purposes. The age at with kids learn to read analog clocks is the same age where kids are skip counting and starting to see numbers in different modes of representations, both of which analog clocks provide, forcing kids to think mathematically in their everyday lives. Further in their math education, it also becomes a helpful jumping off point for understanding modulo arithmetic and non-base 10 counting systems.
It can also be lost over time! I finished high school (which had analog clocks in all the classrooms) a long time ago, and have always used digital clocks in my adult life.
I recently purchased an analog watch on a lark, and it took me a week or two of use before I could read it quickly again!
This fun game just made me realize that actually using analog watch does not require converting the time to HH:MM.
I've been using analog watch for years, my Apple Watch face is set to analog and, apparently, I read the time as "it's almost 11", but never as "it's 10:58".
yeah, i've been using cheap mechanical analog watches and wouldn't trust it to be accurate to-the-minute by the end of the day anyway. i kind of enjoy knowing only the approximate time.
That's because one doesn't usually look at their watch to find out what the time is: most of the time (pun unintended) we want to how much time is left for an activity, or for an activity to start.
As in, how many more minutes before my flight takes off, or how much time left for this exam?
Yep this is why I prefer analog watches. They are much faster to internalize the time but slower to convert to numbers. Because it’s an abstraction I innately know as someone who learned to read them as a child they are very familiar and easy to read. You really only need the actual numbers when someone asks you for the time.
The classic example of this is when someone sees you check your watch, then they ask the time, and you have to check the watch again to see what time it actually is. A comment is almost always made about how the watch was just checked.
Well, maybe because digital is better at showing small differences in this case? Like on a 50kmh road, dropping below 50 is quite noticeable in digital, less so with a line above or below another line.
But for the revs, I think it's quite clear that the analog is better.
Maybe one way to put it would be how important an exact value is? For the speed, it is. For revs, the relative value and its change is much more important and humans track movement much better.
It’s because speedometers aren’t showing a fraction of a whole. Analog clocks work by showing how far through the minute/hour/12 hour period you are. Speedometers are just sticks pointing at numbers. Analog speedometers do however do a better of representing your acceleration than digital ones because the speed of the dial does show acceleration.
> They are much faster to internalize the time but slower to convert to numbers.
People keep saying that, but even after trying all my life, I still can't read analog clocks without mentally "decoding" the exact time. And I'm usually good at quickly building visual intuitions!
Though I think I experience what you're describing, just with digital clocks. For those it feels like I'm not reading 4 separate digits, as if the general "shape" is enough.
Same, I find it easier to see time on analogue. When I see 3:30 for example, in my head I see hands of a watch (in-fact, a very particular watch I grew up seeing in the shade in courtyard). I visualize not just the watch but the lighting at that time of day as well. Gives me perfect sense of how late or early in the day that time means.
Yes, if you use an analog indicator for an analog parameter, you can skip a „parse” step. Similarly, airplanes use analog indicators, or digital ones that either mimic their analog counterparts, or in some way incorporate visual aids that go past a number. This allows the pilot to, at a glance, check the values, see the rate of change, get a useful readout even if the value is noisy or oscillating.
I got a mechanical watch with a 24-hour dial, and I see it as “mid-morning”, “late afternoon” etc.
It does annoy me that it’s harder to find 24-hr dials with noon at the top and midnight at the bottom. They all put midnight at the top for some reason.
Have you ever run in to issues sharing your interpretation?
Like, people ask me the time, I say "almost 11", and they insist "but what time is it rEallY" and it's like...it really is almost 11, if you required access to the information that it is 10:58, you'd have the access to determine that. There's no world in which you need to know when it is 10:58 and do not have the ability to determine that.
If you're asking, you need exactly the general read I just offered.
As a habitually right-on-time person, I disagree. I time things down to seconds, not minutes. I'm rarely ever late and almost never early, but to be that way, I need to know exactly what time it is. And if I'm asking, it's because my watch is broken, and the general read you offered is exactly useless to me.
Most people asking just need the general time, but if they follow up asking for the precise time and you know what it is, it's for a good reason that you've obviously never considered. It's up to you to help them out, or give them a hard time for no good reason. Your choice will say a lot about you.
If you really needed the exact specific time, you'd be wrong to trust a random analog watch anyway because you know how inaccurate they are given how much you care about time.
Your entire hostility is based on the assumption that I do know the actual time, which I usually don't because I don't live my life like that. I cannot handle either the anxiety of waiting until the last minute to do something or the friction of being upset in traffic or being perturbed over someone showing up "five minutes late when they damn well knew the meeting was at WX:YZ" or whatever.
I am almost always early, and can't remember the last time I was late, but I don't mind that at all because I am far more comfortable spending a few minutes meditating, gathering my thoughts, planning, etc in between events than acting like I'm speed running life.
My point was more referring to the many instances in which I know the person and the situation and know that the exact time is both irrelevant and not likely offered by my watch.
> Have you ever run in to issues sharing your interpretation?
Not really.
Of course, having an analog Apple Watch face does not mean that don't know the exact time for the cases when I need to know the minutes, e.g. for a train departure time or things like that. It's just a mental calculation that I don't normally perform when I quickly look at my watch.
I would agree that people who need to know the time up to a minute normally won't ask because they likely have their own device showing it; and if they don't, they most likely don't need to know it up to a minute. But if they indeed do, I don't have problems with converting the watch time to HH:MM.
I like your take, but specifically to the Apple Watch: I’ve been using it for 10 years, and still find it annoying that Apple ships so few high-quality digital faces.
It’s either cutesy stuff with one complication or overwhelming complex ones.
my only issue is that it cares if you are off by 1 minute, meanwhile in the real world a lot of analog clocks have continuously moving minutes and a lot of others have ticking minutes (they only move right at the minute mark).
Appreciate the feedback! It cares, yeah, but being off-by-a-minute doesn't really dock your overall score very much. I figured without that, a "perfect" would be much less meaningful.
That's just presenting improvements to a mechanism; while it isn't common, particularly for watches, and I don't know much about earlier examples, they do seem to exist.
For clocks, however, there is the iconic Swiss railway clock [1], which dates back to 1944 and has a jumping minute. For those, however, the jump is actually meaningful in itself, in they're synchronized by a master clock that has a one minute impulse, and the jump is actually the moment of the impulse.
This was fun! Good call on directing to the free play before jumping into the daily challenge. I was disappointed when I realized there was no leader board for the daily challenge.
It seems to not support 24h? When I see e.g. 17:35 I want to type 17:35 instead of 5:35. Because I very seldomly see 5:35! Interesting observation by itself, but a slightly annoying that I have to convert to 12h for this game.
To OP, you should look into Barbara Arrowsmith-Young's clock exercises. They start with a single hand, and add more and more hands until the units get out into centuries or millennia.
Correcting your previously-entered time by selecting the hour and tapping a different number doesn’t work. It initially shows the hour selected but then overwrites the right-most component (eg seconds)
Off topic but it annoys me so much that Apple decided not to make the hands see-through as they pass the day window on the face. Like even the actual analog clocks do this with a little window on the hand?
I once saw a watch that had a button to move the hands out of the way to see the complications. I submitted feedback to Apple that they should add something like this. With it being digital, they have all kinds of options, like having the hands fly off and grow back over a few seconds.
lol, this completely misses the point of analogue watches or clocks.
It should be called 'keypad data entry game' instead.
The point of an analogue clock is that it gives you an instant sense of the rough time at a glance. I can immediately see it's 'about half past' or 'only a few minutes left until the meeting at 11' or whatever.
> have a means to get it ... in tv broadcasting etc
I think you're missing the point of wearing an analog watch, which is fine, but still missing the point nonetheless. :)
As an avid watch wearer, all analog, I built the game so I could improve my skills, because under pressure when somebody asks "what time is it?", I want to be able to tell them exactly, because I should be able to read it! I think it's good to want to improve your skills, whatever that may be. You shouldn't bar people from that because you disagree.
I don't disagree you should improve your skills. but I don't think your app is optimized for that.
But, ok you're the gamemaker, then well done building something, and I hope people enjoy it.
For me, an analogue watch is good for giving you an extremely glance-able approximate time. And potentially as exquisite mechanical jewellery.
If you need to know the exact time and want to be able to tell it quickly, you might be better with a digital watch.
But my initial point is that the game is not so much about recognizing the time, even the exact time, but about entering it into the keypad.
That's what I mean about missing the point of analogue clocks, you can extremely quickly get the rough time, and with practice even the exact time, but parsing it into text and entering it is the bottleneck.
Maybe add a multiple-choice mode - show the analogue clocks, pick the digital match.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 45.3 ms ] threadThe oldest is in college now. Next time I see her, I’ll ask if she ever learned to read an analog face.
I don't think kids need to learn to read analog clocks anymore, in the same way that we don't teach kids to use slide rules. Technology has advanced enough that analog clocks have joined polaroid cameras and vinyl records in the "obsolete technology that some people use for nostalgia or fashion" category.
(for the record, I grew up with analog clocks and I am fully fluent in using them.)
assumption digital 'more advanced' than analog.
unclear. How digital more 'advanced'? Is regression, not advance.
Analog watch. See gap between minute hand and start of meeting. See gap get smaller. Instant.
Colleague in different time zone? See hour hand -3 steps, faster than "14 - 3 is 11". If digital even have 24 hr time, many no.
Teach kids. Analog visible, easy to read, child can see. Child can turn hands on wooden clock, manipulate. Now plus 1 hour, now plus 1.5 hours. Move long hand forward 1 rotation, 1.5 rotations.
Digital? Teach kids "now plus 90 minutes" digital? Hard math. now plus 90 is now (hour) plus 1 and now (minute) plus 30. Teach kids "now minus 10". Does hour change? Why hour change? why now hour different from now minute? daddy daddy what about now seconds? All abstract, cannot touch. Daddy why move hour number first?
Digital. 1 on microwave less than 99. Where else in world 1 < 99 makes sense? Digital time math crazy.
> Digital. 1 on microwave less than 99. Where else in world 1 < 99 makes sense? Digital time math crazy.
Everywhere? 1 is always less than 99 everywhere.
I press 99 on my microwave. It starts to run for 99 seconds.
1 minute < 99 seconds.
On microwaves that do have this feature, set the power first to bypass it.
Analog clocks also have the benefit of being able to better visualize time. A lot of people with ADHD talk about time blindness. One common thing sold to them are analog countdown timers that look like a big pie chart. An analog watch effectively does the same thing, especially a dive watch. The user can see how much time they have instead of needing to calculate it and try to translate that into some kind of meaning. Rarely does anyone need to know the exact time, and the analog clock shines at giving an approximate time quickly, to see progress, without actually ever having to know what time it is. A progress bar for the day, if you will.
One of my favorite watches is one with a single hand and a 24-hour dial. I like it for weekends and vacation. I want a watch, I want to know roughly where I'm at in the day, but I don't want to stress about the minutes.
For anyone looking for one of these, you can search for 'time timer'.
Also it would be a bit to close to Futurama to see e.g. Big Ben get a digital overhaul.
I recently purchased an analog watch on a lark, and it took me a week or two of use before I could read it quickly again!
I've been using analog watch for years, my Apple Watch face is set to analog and, apparently, I read the time as "it's almost 11", but never as "it's 10:58".
As in, how many more minutes before my flight takes off, or how much time left for this exam?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag
Apparently being raised with analog clocks vs digital changes how one intuits the passage of time.
But for the revs, I think it's quite clear that the analog is better.
Maybe one way to put it would be how important an exact value is? For the speed, it is. For revs, the relative value and its change is much more important and humans track movement much better.
People keep saying that, but even after trying all my life, I still can't read analog clocks without mentally "decoding" the exact time. And I'm usually good at quickly building visual intuitions!
Though I think I experience what you're describing, just with digital clocks. For those it feels like I'm not reading 4 separate digits, as if the general "shape" is enough.
03:30 is anywhere from dead of night to nearly dawn for me. Similarly 15:30 is anywhere from near midday to near sundown.
It does annoy me that it’s harder to find 24-hr dials with noon at the top and midnight at the bottom. They all put midnight at the top for some reason.
Like, people ask me the time, I say "almost 11", and they insist "but what time is it rEallY" and it's like...it really is almost 11, if you required access to the information that it is 10:58, you'd have the access to determine that. There's no world in which you need to know when it is 10:58 and do not have the ability to determine that.
If you're asking, you need exactly the general read I just offered.
Most people asking just need the general time, but if they follow up asking for the precise time and you know what it is, it's for a good reason that you've obviously never considered. It's up to you to help them out, or give them a hard time for no good reason. Your choice will say a lot about you.
Your entire hostility is based on the assumption that I do know the actual time, which I usually don't because I don't live my life like that. I cannot handle either the anxiety of waiting until the last minute to do something or the friction of being upset in traffic or being perturbed over someone showing up "five minutes late when they damn well knew the meeting was at WX:YZ" or whatever.
I am almost always early, and can't remember the last time I was late, but I don't mind that at all because I am far more comfortable spending a few minutes meditating, gathering my thoughts, planning, etc in between events than acting like I'm speed running life.
My point was more referring to the many instances in which I know the person and the situation and know that the exact time is both irrelevant and not likely offered by my watch.
Not really.
Of course, having an analog Apple Watch face does not mean that don't know the exact time for the cases when I need to know the minutes, e.g. for a train departure time or things like that. It's just a mental calculation that I don't normally perform when I quickly look at my watch.
I would agree that people who need to know the time up to a minute normally won't ask because they likely have their own device showing it; and if they don't, they most likely don't need to know it up to a minute. But if they indeed do, I don't have problems with converting the watch time to HH:MM.
It’s either cutesy stuff with one complication or overwhelming complex ones.
For clocks, however, there is the iconic Swiss railway clock [1], which dates back to 1944 and has a jumping minute. For those, however, the jump is actually meaningful in itself, in they're synchronized by a master clock that has a one minute impulse, and the jump is actually the moment of the impulse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock
Now when people ask me what time it is and I say 1845, they often follow up with "What time is it really for normal people?"
Quarter 'til 19 of course.
analog.watch Daily Challenge 2026-07-09
Score: 8,946 Time: 39.2s
analog.watch Daily Challenge 2026-07-09
Score: 22,020 Time: 32.0s
I mustve forgotten how common 'public' clocks used to be. Now... not even the clock on my local town hall is correct
Two suggestions:
- Let me enter the time with my keyboard - Make your input numpad match a PC keyboard's numpad, not a phone's
It should be called 'keypad data entry game' instead.
The point of an analogue clock is that it gives you an instant sense of the rough time at a glance. I can immediately see it's 'about half past' or 'only a few minutes left until the meeting at 11' or whatever.
> have a means to get it ... in tv broadcasting etc
I think you're missing the point of wearing an analog watch, which is fine, but still missing the point nonetheless. :)
As an avid watch wearer, all analog, I built the game so I could improve my skills, because under pressure when somebody asks "what time is it?", I want to be able to tell them exactly, because I should be able to read it! I think it's good to want to improve your skills, whatever that may be. You shouldn't bar people from that because you disagree.
But, ok you're the gamemaker, then well done building something, and I hope people enjoy it.
For me, an analogue watch is good for giving you an extremely glance-able approximate time. And potentially as exquisite mechanical jewellery. If you need to know the exact time and want to be able to tell it quickly, you might be better with a digital watch.
But my initial point is that the game is not so much about recognizing the time, even the exact time, but about entering it into the keypad.
That's what I mean about missing the point of analogue clocks, you can extremely quickly get the rough time, and with practice even the exact time, but parsing it into text and entering it is the bottleneck.
Maybe add a multiple-choice mode - show the analogue clocks, pick the digital match.