The sunclock.net web page shows a 24 hour clock together with information about the sun for your location.
The colors show the golden hours, plus the three types of twilight you’ll encounter – Civil, Nautical, and Astronomical.
An unusual feature is that it can show the time counterclockwise (anticlockwise). About the only feature missing is – ironically – support for Dark Mode.
Pical is an iPhone app that uses the 24 hour dial to help you plan your calendar.
From the app’s description:
A visual calendar to help focus your day. Calendar events are displayed on a 24h clock dial, representing the entire day. Easily keep track of upcoming events with a time-remaining countdown display in the center of the dial.
Two calendar groups: The dial is split into two rings, so you can prioritize some calendars over others. For example, use the outer one for your own, and the inner one for your family members’ or colleagues’ schedules. Or just keep your work calendar and personal calendar separate.
Visualize time zones: Tap on the current time to pull up a visual display of customized time zones. Easily see what time of day it is for international friends and colleagues.
See when you’re free on any day of the month: A 24h dial is neatly split into four parts: morning, afternoon, evening, and night. In month view, you can see not only on which days you have appointments, but whether you’re free in the morning, or for lunch, or for dinner, on any particular day.
See where new events fit: When you add or edit an event, you’ll be shown when your other events are, so you can plan around them. Set appointment length instantly with our time slider.
A widget you won’t be able to live without: See your entire day on your home page, as soon as you unlock your phone, and how much time you have till your next event. Indispensable information, right at hand.
As you can see from the screen shots, the execution of this concept is excellent throughout the application.
One interesting thing about this app is that it’s specifically targeted to ADHD sufferers – the app’s full name on the App Store is “PiCal – ADHD Clock + Calendar”. There are a couple of posts on this blog that highlight the utility of the simpler 24 hour design:
I do wonder whether this specific targeting to ADHD, good though it is, may deter others from benefiting from the improved usability of the 24 hour dial. I hope not.
One point to note: the app appears to be a subscription-only app: free to download, and then $3.49 per month, or $25 per year.
Visit Pical for more information.
I enjoyed this post by Jack Forster about twilight and dusk on the Apple Watch Solar Face, one of the rare occasions when the Apple design team exploit the 24-hour analog dial.
Visit Hodinkee.com for the article.
At their recent WorldWide Developers Conference, Apple again showed that they quite like the 24 hour watch face. Again, though, they’re not 100% convinced that the world is ready to tell the time on a 24-hour dial. This is as close as they’re going to get, this year at least:
It’s their new “solar face”, showing the position of the sun in the sky, (like a good old-fashioned medieval astronomical clock). They’ve also kept a 12-hour dial just to help you switch over to the 24 hour dial.
They already use the less error-prone design on current watches for selecting alarm times (when it’s important not to confuse 12am with 12pm:
But if you want a more modern display suitable for your modern lifestyle, there’s a new iOS app that brings the 24 hour dial to your phone and your wrist. The app is called Circa, and it’s very well done.
Here’s the iPhone app:
The coloured rings are the “office hours” for the time zone: you can change the names and hours for each one. You can add more cities easily. Notice the short white bars around the edge: these are the appointments taken automatically from your Calendar (if you give permission, of course!). The developer lives in Kiev, I think!
You can touch and move the single hour hand around, to find exact conversions between local and other time zones. You can also create new calendar events.
The Apple Watch app installs automatically when you install the iPhone app, and it’s more or less equivalent in functionality.
It also lets you move the hour hand around (with your finger or using the digital crown) to see equivalent times in other zones. You can also add Circa as a complication on the other Apple watch faces.
The developer of Circa is Kostiantyn Zuiev.
(See also an earlier post looking at Alex Komarov’s development of an iPhone app.)
I stumble across the occasional app of interest to this site whenever I browse through Apple’s App Store. If you find something, please feel free to post a comment, especially if you frequent the Android store!
The Phaeton brings 18th-century astronomy to the iPad through a modern interpretation of five astronomical instruments of antiquity: the Tellurion, the Grand Orrery, the Astrolabe, the Lunarium and the Jovilabe.
I like the shiny brass effect.
The developers, Tau Ceti Systems, may have moved on from app development, so I’d grab this before it falls into the black hole of discontinued apps…
Beautiful in another way is Jan Frischmuth’s Orrery:
The 24 hour clock at the bottom goes counterclockwise, which is neat.
You can buy this app for most platforms.
Masato Mori wrote this simple but appealing simulation of the famous clock in St Mark’s Square, Venice.
This is a decorative app based on the clock tower that stands above the Piazza San Marco in Venice. The astronomical clock features the constellations of the twelve signs on a rich blue background, with special attention paid to the detail on the twelve signs. Display it on your iPad or iPhone to add a taste of Venice to your home. The hand on the 24-hour clock moves slowly but surely, allowing you to enjoy the passing of time at a leisurely pace.
The designer sneaked in a 12-hour option, which I’m not sure about!
Yury Barabanov has done quite a good job with his app called Market 24h Clock, although the buttons on some of the other screens are a bit large for my taste. Still, if you want to know when the financial markets round the world are open, this should do the trick:
Also available for other platforms.
Emerald Sequoia’s Observatory app, a slightly different take on their excellent Chronometer, is slightly compromised (for the purists on this site!) by the 12 hour hands and dial. But the outer 24 hour dial and stunning appearance lets us overlook the omission of 24-hour-only operation. As with Chronometer, it’s an app to take your time and get used to.
From Markus at Celestial Dynamics comes this beautiful iPhone/iPad/Android app, Cosmic Watch:
The Cosmic Watch is an interactive 3d tool. You can use it as a realtime worldclock, time travel machine, an astrolab, an antikythera mechanism, an orrery, an armillary sphere, or an astral-chart generator.
The unique thing about the clock face is its ecliptic view around the planet. The complex mechanism of telling time is at the touch of your hands with the Cosmic Watch App.
Víctor San Vicente created this live display of power generation in Spain:
Running in your web browser, this clock lets you organize communications with people in other countries:
Now with 24-hour time strings as well.
World Chat Clock – By Darkhorse Analytics
Updated with new URL 2014-10-30 19:56:02
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 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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
24hourtime.info 