Author: 24hourtime

24 hours a day

Applications for iPad and iPhone often make use of the 24 hour dial, mainly because it’s a much simpler interface to the daily routine, showing the entire day at a glance, and avoiding the inevitable confusion between AM and PM.

Rove

Rove is a simple iPhone app that tracks your movements unobtrusively, in the background, and records them, together with any notes and photographs that you take as you go. Billed as private journalling or life-logging, Rove shows your current day (only the current day at present) on a 24 hour dial:

Rove

Owaves

Owaves is, according to the developer, “the world’s first wellness planner”:

Owaves makes it easy to plan health and wellness goals into your day. Colorful and vibrant, with a novel 24-hour clock, the planner is fun to use and lets you see your day in a whole new way. Oriented to sunrise and sunset, Owaves guides you to a balanced lifestyle and healthy circadian rhythm.

Eastern and Western health experts agree there are five main ingredients for a long and healthy life:

-Sleep

-Nutrition

-Exercise

-Mindfulness, Meditation, Yoga, Managing Stress

Love and Social

Owaves is the only day planner in the world designed to let you prioritize these activities alongside work, play and miscellaneous errands.

The planner incorporates input from thought leaders in chronobiology, mindfulness, and professional sports.

It’s Visual. It’s Fun. And it’s Easy-to-use.

owaves health clock

The developer explains:

The clock is oriented with sunrise at traditional 12 o’clock position. Sunrise and sunset are prominently featured and localized based on the user’s location. There’s arguably an epidemic of circadian rhythm disorders going on post-rapid spread of artificial light, so this gentle “nudge” is meant to remind the user that sunrise is the beginning of the day.

– menu of activities focuses on 5 key aspects of preventive health as per the American College of Preventive Medicine and American College of Lifestyle Medicine: exercise, sleep, nutrition, stress management, and love/social

The future plan is to integrate wearable device data to create a feedback loop for wellness and health applications.

Through the lens of wellness and health, the 5 main activities featured – Exercise, Sleep, Nutrition, Relax (i.e. managing stress) and Love/Social (i.e. spending time with loved ones) – are THE activities of interest. Considered the new “lifestyle vital signs” by the American College of Preventive Medicine and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, since they are more prognostic of chances for future morbidity and mortality for today’s generation than the vital signs of the past (i.e. HR, BP, RR, etc.). I.e. they are more helpful in assessing one’s chances of obtaining a chronic disease like: diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, metabolic syndrome, depression, anxiety, osteoporosis, …

The next version will include: Weekly and Monthly views, Social Sharing Options, a Brief Tutorial and a bit more… And of course, as mentioned, calendar integration and circadian rhythm intelligence are on the books as well.

Owaves is promising, and will become much more useful when calendar integration is implemented.

How does my day look?

A day in the life of architect Le Corbusier:

Corbusiers days

This is one of the entries on an intriguing infographic by R J Andrews posted at infowetrust.com. It shows typical daily routines of some famous historical figures, displaying their work/recreation activities on a 24 hour chart.

Creative routines edit3

The two advantages of the 24 hour analog way of displaying time are that the entire day can be seen at a glance, and that time is displayed in context. Whereas a digital display tells you the time right now, an analog dial can show you the current time in the context of the surrounding time periods.

To use this kind of display to plan your time rather than record it, you could look for some suitable software, although there isn’t much around at the moment. One example I spotted recently is the CandooIt concept, currently available for iPhone and iPads, but perhaps planned for Androids soon, who knows. The idea is that your calendar and other plans can be shown on a circular chart, thus allowing you to see ‘at a glance’ what your day looks like.

Candooitscreen568x568

However, in its present form, CandooIt is difficult to use with an interface that’s both too minimalistic and confusingly animated, and it doesn’t really provide the features that you would expect from a basic calendar/planning app (such as reading from the built-in calendar…). Hopefully the author can improve the execution and make the concept work.

Butterfly Dial

The Butterfly Dial is an ingenious invention designed to combine both the 12 hour and 24 hour dials into a single 12 hour dial.

It’s much easier to see it in action than try to explain it:

butterfly dial

The video can be seen on YouTube.

It’s no substitute for a true 24 hour dial, but it’s a much neater solution than the Cyclos dial, described in the Design page of this site:

cyclos

DayTime for iOS

From the makers of DayTime:

Imagine you are facing south, with the position of the sun marking the current time. Day and night are shown by the light and dark regions above and below. (24-hour day or night appear all light or all dark—try it by choosing Vadsø NO, or the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station!) Sunrise and sunset positions are marked where night meets day, and the amount of daylight remaining is the arc from the sun’s position to the sunset line (arrow).

daytime

For example, at 2:00PM on January 1st in Copenhagen, there were less than 2 hours left of daylight—but without computation one can intuitively see very quickly that the short winter day is almost over.

You can download DayTime from the App Store.