Tag: Clock »

Innovations at Apple are great, of course, but how does the Apple Watch perform as an actual watch? It’s something that few of us have probably given much thought because we were too busy wondering if this would be the next big thing for Apple in terms of gaming and app design.

Turns out it works much better than you’d expect.

Countdown, by Yves Tscherry, is now available on the App Store. The app keeps track of countdowns to your favorite things such as someones birthday or days till the New Year. You can display the time in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years or you can watch them all at once. The app is available for the iPhone, iPad, and the Apple Watch (when it comes out).

You can download Countdown for $0.99 on the App Store.

Time Buddy, by MoveoApps, is a super simple and easy clock app. It only takes one swipe to find out the time anywhere in the world. You can choose between 12 hour and 24 hour displays as well as analog or digital. It can also be added as a widget to your notification center.

You can download Time Buddy for free on the App Store now.

The Clock app. Not much to it, right? Wrong. There's some little tweaks and intricacies that you should know about that can help make this core system app better to use.

The World Clock section can display the times from various cities. Just tap the + in the upper-right corner to add a city. Tap the time to switch between analog and digital clocks. City searching is a bit frustrating in that it only supports a limited number of cities. Thus, for comparing where you are to other world cities, you may need to choose a city in your time zone that isn't where you are. For example, Lubbock, TX isn't in the list of cities despite being where I got my start, and the home of America's dreamiest football coach, Kliff Kingsbury. So, you may need to put in a larger city near you in your time zone. You can also search by country, not just city name, if you just need to find a city in a country somewhere to compare your time to.

The Alarm section of course allows for various alarms to be set, but there's a variety of options here. Repeat allows for one alarm to be used on a regular basis, so you can set an alarm for weekdays, and one for weekends, or any combination of days, and not have to worry about setting it before you go to sleep. You can also label alarms individually. The Sound function works with songs, alert tones, and ringtones, so you can wake up to whatever you so choose. Snooze can be disabled for those who know that they'd get up way too late if they snooze too much. However, now when you snooze, the lock screen shows how long the snooze is for.

The Stopwatch is a stopwatch. You can use the Lap timer to list any lap times, though the data can't be copied and exported in any way, unfortunately.

The Timer can be used to set off an alarm a certain number of hours or minutes from whe it is set. It has one incredibly useful feature that you may not be aware of. Think that the When Timer Ends section is just for selecting which alert to play? Nope! Scroll all the way to the bottom and enable Stop Playing and when the timer ends, if you have a music app playing, sound will stop being played. Note that Spotify has a bug with it, but it works for the built-in music app and Pandora. This way, you can fall asleep to music without it wasting power your bandwidth.

And of course, the system time can be set by going to Settings->General->Date & Time. Here you can configure 24-Hour Time to show 13:31 instead of 1:31 PM for example, choose to have the network set the time automatically, and manually choose your time zone, though automatic time setting will try to locate which time zone you're in automatically. You can enable or disable this in Settings->Privacy->Location Services->System Services->Setting Time Zone.

Hopefully you now know all the useful little things you can do with this otherwise-straightforward function!

There was a vast profusion of cool stuff happening across the 148Apps network this week, but the top of the top was the culmination of our 2011 Best App Ever awards. Head honcho Jeff Scott writes, "It was an amazing year. With over 1.5 million votes cast (over three times the number cast last year) and a record number of nominations, we now have the winners of the 2011 Best App Ever Awards. Thanks to all that voted, nominated, and made these fantastic apps!"

Read the full list of winners, and our own Carter Dotson's take on them, on 148Apps.com.

Kid-friendly GiggleApps featured a review of Fun Clock-Learn to Tell Time. Reviewer Amy Solomon writes, "Few apps actually tackle explaining the true concept of telling time they way this app does. After watching the included video in Fun Clock – Learn to Tell Time, children will be will well on their way to understanding how to read a analogue clock. As a parent, I don’t think I could have explained this better myself, also wishing that this video had been around when I was a child."

Take the time to read the full review on GiggleApps.

Finally, over at Android Rundown, Carter Dotson took a closer look at Apple's recent iBooks education initiative and evaluated it for what it could mean for the Android platform. Dotson writes, "It may not have been the sexiest announcement, but Android supporters – manufacturers and users alike – should not underestimate Apple’s education gambit. Their big push into education with iBooks 2 being optimized for textbooks (both the reading and selling thereof) and iTunes U offering deeper integration with college courses could be the necessary roots they have to lay down for long-term success at the expense of Android."

Read the full commentary on Android Rundown.

And that's the week that was. Don't forget to read a full list of Best App Ever winners at www.bestappever.com, and keep following us on Twitter and Facebook for all the contests, news and reviews you can eat. I'll be playing Jetpack Joyride non-stop until next week, but I'll see you back here then.

Newly released on the app store comes CountCon, an app with a pretty neat feature. CountCon enables users to have a countdown timer on their homescreen icon, thus reducing the need for them to open the app to see what time is left.

Using the local notification system, CountCon ensures that users can set seconds, minutes, hours or even days for their countdown timer. It's the kind of idea that makes it easy to wonder just why such an idea hasn't been tried before. Extra customization comes in the form of the ability to set custom ringtones for when the countdown ends.

Ultimately though, CountCon can be a pretty hands off app as once the timer's set, it should be fine to leave it to its own devices. It's not going to win prizes for looks or gimmicks. It's just simple but to the point.

CountCon is an universal app and available now for $0.99.