iphone

Pical – iPhone 24 hour calendar plannning

Pical is an iPhone app that uses the 24 hour dial to help you plan your calendar.

Timezones 2048x2048

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.

Link to the US App store

Dayview 2048x2048

As you can see from the screen shots, the execution of this concept is excellent throughout the application.

EventDuration

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.

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An astrolabe on your iPhone and iPad

The Astrolabe Clock is:

an astronomical clock inspired by the astrolabe, an ancient astronomical instrument used to tell time and to predict the location of the Sun, stars and planets. This modern interpretation gives a view of the sky showing at a glance the time of day, day of year, and the location in the sky of the Sun, Moon, planets and stars. Astrolabe Clock also gives the time of sunrise and sunset, the phase of the Moon, transit times for the Sun, Moon, planets and stars, and can be used to show the occurrence of solar and lunar eclipses.

See the web site at http://www.twonineeightsoftware.com/AstrolabeClock.html or visit the iTunes app store.

Skyclock

Meet Skyclock:

Twilight awareness – the gift of time.
Skyclock is twilight, sunrise, and sunset times on an analog face for your exact location.

Skyclock, for both the iPhone and the PC (Windows only), has a 24 hour mode that makes a lot more sense to me than the 12 hour ‘conventional’ mode.

Skyclock for iPhone

Skyclock for iPhone

Find the iPhone on the iTunes App Store (it’s free, ad-supported) and go to Skyclock for the PC version.

I feel it’s similar to the more minimal Sol for the iPhone, but sadly that seems to have disappeared from the App store.

More iPhone clocks and watches

A few more 24 hour iPhone applications are appearing in the iTunes App Store. If you want to check any of these out, let me know how they work – I have no idea.

Here’s a familiar sight: the famous Shepherd Gate Clock at Greenwich, London. The Shepherd Gate Clock (this link is a link to the App Store) costs a modest dollar. I’m assuming that this is a genuine 24 hour analog clock. The time here is 20:10. It’s going to look a bit odd at midnight, with that sunlit brick wall…

shepherd-iphone.png

This next one is a puzzle. It’s called iWatch, and it features an attractive rendering of three watches, including this Patek Phillippe watch with a 24 hour rotating dial. What looks like the hour hand is really the minute hand, and what looks like the minute hand is really the second hand. So the time on this picture is about 04:18:49.

iwatch.jpg

(I’m not a big fan of the design, to be honest. The map is coarse, and that font isn’t attractive.) The real puzzle, though, is why this app is suddenly no longer available on the App Store, now that I want to provide a link to it.

The next app, nHands Clock, is a useful clock that lets you add as many hours hands as you like, with colour and labels of your choice. It’s a clever way of showing you the different time zones of people you know:

nhands.png

Finally, this excellent app is called 25h:

25h.png

The idea is simple:

Feeling overstretched? 24 hours in a day is not enough? Then 25h is a clock for you.

Trick yourself into having 25 hours in a day. Get things done faster and have an extra “hour” for yourself.

Note that 25h does not modify time–space continuum (or your biological clock) to give you an extra hour. It simply makes the rest of your hours appear a little shorter so that enough time is saved for an additional shorter “hour” at the end of the day.

I know some people who set their watches fast – this is an interesting alternative.

Where are the iPhone clocks?

Native applications for the iPhone and the iPod Touch are arriving in droves at the iTunes App store. However, there are very few clock apps, and only one of interest to 24 hour clock fans. It’s called Sol, written by Alexander Valys, (web site http://sol.avalys.net/). It’s an elegant sun clock showing the rising and setting times of the sun for a number of locations, on a 24 hour dial (12 noon at the top, 24:00 at the bottom).

sol.png

iPhone clock

Here’s a software experiment: a time piece for the iPhone. It’s a ‘web app’, which means that it’s an ordinary web page that’s been designed specifically to work on an iPhone or iPod Touch. In fact, I suspect that it won’t work in any other browser apart from Safari. The artwork is mostly in PDF, for one thing.

iphone web app clock

If you have an iPhone (or an iPod Touch), please try this out, and let me know what you think!

Note that a single tap will rotate the dial so that 12 or 24 is at the top.