Time Hub Express

About this site

One person, in Singapore, building nine tools that run entirely in your browser — and a written rule for how places get named.

Last reviewed 2026-08-10

What this site is

Time Hub Express is nine free tools for keeping time and working out dates. Five are working today: the stopwatch, the timer, the pomodoro timer, the date difference calculator and the time zone converter. A countdown, a world clock and a meeting planner are next; a business-days calculator is planned but not yet scheduled, because handling public holidays honestly for a worldwide audience is a larger problem than it looks.

There is no account and no sign-up. The site is a set of static files, and every calculation runs on your device rather than on a server. Your timers and saved settings stay in your browser.

Who runs it

One person — an individual developer based in Singapore. Not a team, not a company, and no editorial board behind the “we” on these pages. Saying so is more useful than the alternative: you can weigh what you read against the fact that one person wrote and checked all of it.

You can reach that person through the contact page. If a tool gives you an answer you think is wrong, send the exact inputs you used.

Why it exists

Two reasons. The first: these tools are useful, and easy to get wrong in ways that can be demonstrated rather than argued about. A date calculator that reads “today” off a UTC timestamp is wrong for hours a day across most of the world — a mistake we shipped ourselves on an earlier site, where it is still live. Here it is not a matter of remembering: the build fails if that call appears anywhere in this codebase. The accuracy page sets out what is tested, and where answers can still be wrong.

The second is money: the site is supported by advertising, and that is what keeps it free.Everything you enter — timers, saved cities, countdowns — is computed in your browser and stored only on your device. This site is supported by ads: when advertising is enabled, Google may set cookies and collect data such as your IP address, subject to your consent choices.

What this site deliberately is not

  • Not an account service. No logins, no uploads, no user-generated content, no comments.
  • Not a source of advice. Nothing here is health, medical, financial, legal or safety advice, and no tool that would need it will be built.
  • Not a source of record. Times and dates here are for general planning; check an official source before relying on one.
  • Not a clock authority. Your device carries the time zone rules, so one left un-updated can report a stale offset.

Global by default, not country-specific

Worldwide is a decision about the data model, not a slogan. The weekend is not Saturday and Sunday everywhere: CLDR records Friday and Saturday across much of the Middle East and North Africa, and Sunday alone for India and Uganda — and the United Arab Emirates moved to Saturday and Sunday in 2022. So where a tool needs your working week, it asks rather than assuming.

Cities are chosen for coverage rather than population. A plain top-1,500-by-population list reaches only 145 of the 249 countries in IANA’s country file. The selection used here fills a floor for every zone and country first, which reaches 243 — the most any selection from the source data can reach — in around half as many rows. The table actually shipped is larger than that floor: 1,500 rows covering all313 zones and 247 countries, with the rows the source cannot supply synthesised rather than left empty. Someone in Lagos, Dhaka, Jakarta, São Paulo or Karachi should find their city as readily as someone in New York.

How we name places

Naming a place is sometimes a political act, so the rule followed here is published rather than decided case by case.

Time Hub Express names places the way the Unicode CLDR and the IANA Time Zone Database name them, and takes no position on any territorial claim.

  1. Country and territory names come verbatim from CLDR’s Englishterritories data, at the version recorded below. We do not hand-edit them.
  2. The listed set is exactly IANA’s iso3166.tab.Inclusion is a data-completeness fact, not recognition.
  3. Where CLDR supplies a -alt-short form we prefer it for the row label (UK, US, Palestine, Hong Kong, Macao, Myanmar); the long form is the accessible name.
  4. Display CLDR’s primary name as-is — it already carries a parenthesised dual form where CLDR chose one (MM = “Myanmar (Burma)”, FK-alt-variant = “Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)”).Load all -alt-variant strings into the search index only, never composing them into a display label. That keeps Turkey, Czech Republic, East Timor, Swaziland, Ivory Coast and Cape Verde findable without inventing strings.
  5. Historic and alternative city names are search aliases, never display labels.
  6. We publish the sentence, on this page and in each time zone tool’s methodology block, quoting IANA’s own zone1970.tab header: “It is not intended to take or endorse any position on legal or territorial claims.”
  7. No maps, no flags, no borders, ever. A flag emoji next toTW, PS, HK or XK is a position; a rendered map is a border claim. Hard product rule, and free — the row isCity · Country · ABBR · UTC±HH:MM with no space for one.
  8. Any request to change a name is an owner decision, answered by pointing at CLDR, never by hand-editing the table.

Two of those bear repeating. Inclusion of a territory in the list is a fact about data completeness, not an act of recognition — a row exists because IANA’s country file carries the code, and for no other reason. And a request to change a name is answered by pointing at CLDR rather than by hand-editing the table, because a name edited here would be a name only this site uses.

Where the data comes from, and what we changed

City and time-zone data from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) and the IANA Time Zone Database (public domain). That licence asks three things together — credit the source, link the licence, and say that the material was modified — so: the city list comes fromGeoNames, underthe Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, and The city list is a modified subset: we select, re-rank and add to the source data.

Zones and the country set come from theIANA Time Zone Database, which is public domain; the display names come from Unicode CLDR.

The modifications, in full:

  • Every zone value was rewritten through the time zone database’s backward alias file, so no row carries an identifier IANA has retired — with one deliberate exception. The database treats UTC as the retired spelling of Etc/UTC; we keepUTC, because it is the identifier people recognise, and it is the only exemption.
  • 1,500 rows were selected from 34,080, by the coverage-first rule described above.
  • A rank was computed for every row, to order matches in the city picker. It is not a GeoNames field.
  • 54 synthetic rows were added for zones and countries GeoNames cannot reach — places with no settlement over 15,000 people. They come from the zone database and CLDR, and are flagged, so a synthesised row can always be told from a real one.
  • Rows for Kosovo (XK) were dropped: the shipped country set is exactly IANA’siso3166.tab, which has no such code.

The versions in use are tzdata 2026c and CLDR 48.2.0, with a GeoNames dump retrieved on 9 August 2026, each stored with its retrieval date and a checksum. Thesources page has the full list, the changelog records site changes, and time zone changes tracks the rule changes that move an answer on their own.