User Reviews

"Anyone who is a time hobbyist or just wants to have the most accurate time possible will enjoy this Control Panel. It automatically downloads the atomic time from various time servers (you specify which one of many) around the country that are fed the time directly from the atomic clock. (Hint: if you are ever having trouble with your PPP/TCP connection, disable Network Time temporarily; it is not the cause of the problem, nor will disabling it solve the problem, but it's a pain to have it keep on trying to dial PPP/TCP when you are trying to fix the problem)."
—Andrew Starr

"If, like me, you've been keeping a World Band radio receiver handy to tune in WWV daily to reset your Mac's real-time clock, Network Time 2.0.1 is a must-have piece of software. Network Time checks you in over the Internet--automatically and all in the background--to any one of 93 world-wide Stratum 2 NTP time servers and synchronizes your Mac's clock to an international standard. Perhaps best of all, there's no expensive long distance phone call as with other time servers.

"Network Time's control panel is simple and straight-forward to set up and configure. A good thing, because the documentation (written in MacWrite Pro) doesn't translate well into other word processors. Not to worry, most of the documentation's essential information is available in Balloon Help anyway.

"As a matter of fact, the toughest part of setting up Network Time is deciding which NTP server you should connect to. To locate the servers, check into the Synchronization Page on the WWW at http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/. There you'll find a list of 59 primary (Stratum 1) servers; most of these are of limited access, reserved for synchronizing the time on secondary (Stratum 2) servers and, one presumes, other essential systems. Choose a Stratum 2 server nearest you for reliable access, enter its address in the appropriate Network Time dialog box and click the "Verify" button. The address will be verified by the DNS Resolver (or not, if you've entered the address incorrectly); then you can click "Set Time" and your Mac will be synchronized--correctly and within 1 second--to the international standard. That's about all there is to it and from then on, your Mac's clock will be set automatically as you're merrily surfing away to other far-flung locales."

—William D. Thompson, Ph.D.