A screensaver for a second monitor
Open the page on the spare screen and press F. You get a large analog clock on a calm background, kept awake and drifting a few pixels a minute so that no part of the panel is lit all day.
Your colours, face and screen settings are saved automatically, so the clock comes back the same tomorrow. In fullscreen the page asks the browser to keep the display awake, hides the mouse pointer after a moment and shows an exit button when you move the mouse. A web page cannot register itself as your operating system’s own screensaver, but a fullscreen tab on a second monitor does the same job, and this one shows the right time in any room.
13 faces
From an enamel classic to a skeleton dial with turning gears, all drawn live so they stay sharp on a 4K TV.
20 backgrounds
Colours, concrete, brick and wood, the real sky, an aurora, a starfield, your photo or none at all.
World board
Up to eight cities at once, each with a name plate, its UTC offset and a day or night marker.
Screen care
Burn-in shift, night auto-dim, wake lock and three performance levels for old tablets.
Kiosk link
A link that opens straight into a clean fullscreen with your exact setup, for a TV that boots into it.
Installable
Add it to the home screen or desktop and it opens without browser bars and works offline.
An airport-style world time board
Choose Airport board in the Setups tab, or Clocks, Several, and the page shows two to eight analog clocks in the grid that makes them as large as the screen allows. With Name plates on, each clock gets a plate below it, like the boards in a departures hall: the city or the name you gave it, the offset from UTC, a marker that shows whether it is day or night there and a digital time, with a “+1 day” or “−1 day” tag when the date there differs from yours. Add a caption such as “WORLD TIME” and it appears across the top.
The cities come from a list of about 170 and from every time zone your browser knows, so Asia/Kathmandu works as well as Tokyo. Daylight-saving changes are handled by your browser’s time-zone database, so each clock moves on the right date without any setting. If a city in a ready-made setup shares your own time zone, the setup swaps it for another city, so the board never shows the same time twice.
Reception walls, classrooms and bedsides
The Reception wall setup puts a black and gold Art Deco clock on plaster with a caption such as “Welcome”, the date in a window in the dial and the moon phase on a sub-dial. The Classroom setup uses big numerals with minute numbers outside, colour hands, a ticking second hand and the date below, on paper. The Bedside setup shows a hairline clock in dim red on black with no second hand, at 45% brightness and darker still between 22:00 and 07:00; red light disturbs night vision and sleep less than white. The Kitchen tablet puts the analog clock beside a large digital time, the weekday and the date, and stacks them on a portrait screen. Each setup is only a starting point: change the face, the background or the caption and the rest stays.
A transparent clock for OBS and streams
Choose Stream overlay, or any setup with the Transparent background. In OBS Studio and similar software add a Browser source, paste a kiosk link such as https://jasperbernaers.com/analog-clock-screensaver/?s=overlay&kiosk=1 and set the width and height of your canvas. The page keeps everything but the clock transparent, so it floats over your scene without a green screen. The glowing Neon face works best for this; the brightness slider fades the clock instead of dimming a background. In a normal browser tab a transparent background shows as a chequerboard.
Kiosk mode for a TV, lobby or office wall
Any device with a browser will do: a smart-TV browser, an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi or an HDMI stick. Set the clock up, open Screen & share and press Copy kiosk link. A kiosk link is your setup link with kiosk=1 added: it opens straight into a clean fullscreen with nothing else on the page, and the first click upgrades it to true fullscreen. Press K to leave kiosk mode. A short link such as https://jasperbernaers.com/analog-clock-screensaver/?s=airport&kiosk=1 opens a ready-made setup the same way, and a longer one carries every choice you made.
To start it when the computer boots: on Windows, put a shortcut with the target chrome --kiosk "your-link" in the Startup folder (Win+R, then shell:startup). On macOS, add the browser to Login Items with the link as its home page. On a Raspberry Pi, add chromium-browser --kiosk "your-link" to the autostart file. Because the link carries the whole setup, the clock boots into your exact face, cities and brightness after a power cut.
Keeping the screen on and protecting OLED
In fullscreen the page requests a screen wake lock, which Chrome, Edge and Safari honour. If your browser has none, switch off display sleep in the operating system for that monitor. The burn-in shift (on by default) moves the whole clock a few pixels every minute along a small loop, so no mark stays on the same pixels, and the Brightness slider and Dim at night darken the picture without touching the monitor’s own settings. For an OLED TV that runs for months, still let the panel run its built-in pixel refresh now and then. The Performance setting chooses 60, 30 or 12 frames a second and a lower resolution on the last two: a ticking second hand costs almost nothing in any mode, while a sweeping one and the animated backgrounds are what use the processor.
Thirteen faces, drawn rather than pictured
Every face is painted by the page with the canvas, from the dial to the hands, so it is sharp at any size and takes your colours. Classic is an enamel dial with spade hands and either numerals. Platform is a black railway dial with white bars. Bauhaus is quiet, with batons and one orange hand. Dots and Minimal are modern; Minimal floats a hairline ring over any background. Retro 70s has a warm sunburst. Art Deco is black and gold with a sunburst track and Roman numerals. Neon glows. Blueprint looks like a technical drawing. Mechanical is a skeleton dial with gears that mesh and turn, and a balance wheel. Pocket watch has Roman numerals and a small seconds dial. Pilot is matte black with luminous numerals and an optional 24-hour ring and hand. School has large numerals, minute numbers and colour hands. On some faces, options such as the date window, the moon sub-dial or the 24-hour ring do not apply, and the page greys them out.
The second hand has three personalities: Sweep glides, Tick jumps once a second like a station clock, and Quartz jumps and settles with a tiny overshoot like a cheap quartz movement. Off hides it, and then the minute hand moves in whole steps.
Backgrounds that need no download
Concrete, plaster, brick, wood and the blueprint grid are made by the page for the size of your screen, with seams, tie holes, mortar and grain, so there is nothing to download and nothing to run out of resolution. Real sky works out the position of the sun and moon for the city of your first clock: the colours follow the real sunrise, day, sunset and twilight, stars appear at night and the moon is drawn in its true phase. The aurora and the starfield move slowly (the aurora is painted at low resolution and scaled up, so it stays light on the processor). Your photo is shrunk to at most 2560 pixels on its longest side, kept in your browser’s own storage and never uploaded; a share link cannot carry it, so on another device that background shows a placeholder. Text near the clock changes between light and dark to stay readable on whatever you choose.
A tick and a chime
Sound is off until you switch it on in Screen & share. Quartz tick and Soft tock make a quiet click every second, alternating slightly in pitch; Every hour strikes a bell once for each hour on a 12-hour count; Quarters adds soft notes as well: one at a quarter past, two at half past, three at a quarter to and four before the hour strikes. The sounds are generated by the page, so there is no file to load. Browsers allow sound only after you have clicked or pressed a key on the page, so after a reboot a kiosk stays quiet until the first click.
Install it as an app
Chrome and Edge offer Install in the address bar or in the page’s own button, and on iPhone and iPad you can use Share, Add to Home Screen. The installed app opens in its own window without browser bars (fullscreen where the system allows it), has a shortcut that starts straight in kiosk mode and keeps working offline, because the page and its icons are stored by a small service worker. The fonts come from Google Fonts and are stored by the same service worker after your first visit, so the numerals look the same offline.
Keyboard and screen readers
The clock is drawn on a canvas, so the page also keeps a plain-text list of the time in every city, updated each minute, and describes the canvas with the face you chose. The controls are ordinary buttons, sliders, checkboxes and a combobox with a listbox for the city search. If your system asks for reduced motion, the second hand ticks instead of sweeping and the aurora and starfield stand still. Shortcuts: F fullscreen, ← → faces, C colours, B background, S second hand, N numerals, D date, L layout, T tick, + − size, [ ] brightness, K leave kiosk and R reset.
Private, free and what is stored
Everything runs in your browser. No account, and no city, caption or photo is sent anywhere. The page, its fonts excepted, comes from this site, and visits are counted by SimpleAnalytics, which uses no cookies. The clock reads your device’s clock, so keep it correct; it normally syncs itself over the network.
In your browser it stores jb-analog-clock-v2 (your settings, cities and names), jb-theme (light or dark page), an IndexedDB database called jb-analog-clock that holds your photo only if you choose one, and the offline copy of the page in a cache called acs-shell-v1. A link carries its setup in the address; reset clears the stored settings.
Limits to know about
It is a clock, not a calendar or an alarm: there are no timers, alarms or holidays. Hands, dates and moon phases use your device’s clock and time-zone rules, so a very new change to a country’s rules can be missing in an old browser. The moon phase is a close calculation, not an almanac. A zone that is not one of the listed cities has no coordinates, so the real sky behind it uses an estimated position. A web page cannot start on its own: a kiosk needs the browser to be launched at boot.
More clocks and screens
For many cities at once with a meeting planner see the world clock wall; a countdown for a stage or a green room is the backstage stage clock; the gap between two dates is the days between dates calculator; and the golden hour calculator works out the light for a place. All the fullscreen screens are on the screensavers page.