Description

The NZFireWatch program displays the current watch colour for the New Zealand Fire Service and also the New Zealand St John Ambulance Service. This program is NOT an official program, nor is it sponsored by either service. Please do not email them in regards to this program.

Both services have a 4 watch colour coded system. The watch colours are Red, Green, Blue and Brown. Each watch is on a 2 day, 2 night, 4 day rest rotation. For example, on the first two days, it may be Red watch in the morning, Green watch that evening. On the 3rd day Brown watch has the morning shift, Red watch switches to evening, and Green watch enter their 4 day rest period.

As you can see, this is pretty straight forward, however knowing what watch is on at any given point requires you to either be keeping track each day, or look it up using a calendar or program.

The difference between the two services watch system is St Johns watches are 12 hours each (at 0600hrs and 1800hrs) and NZ Fire Services watches are 10 and 14 (0800hrs and 1800hrs).

This program was originally written to allow me to keep track of what watch was currently on, but I have received a number of feature requests, so it has expanded from there. It has also served as a test-bed to allow me to learn how to write Windows and KDE custom controls, and an experiment in cross-platform development.