iPhone App Reviews

Sun & Time

Michael (Admin) | Oct 6, 2009 Utilities

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I like to moan and groan about having no life and no friends, but that’s mostly because all of my friends live in galaxies far, far away… places like Korea, Norway, Denmark, Australia, and one other country whose name I can’t remember. This is why I’m now a regular user of Call Global, and it’s also why I could see myself using an app like Sun & Time if it had some more features.

The purpose of Sun & Time is to show you where the sun is currently rising and setting on this big wet marble we call Earth. Double-tapping Sun & Time’s world map will provide a close-up view of the region you’re looking at, and tapping on a city will open a dialogue box that shows that city’s current time, sunrise, sunset, international calling code, and whether it’s today or tomorrow at that location. If it’s a place that’s on your mind frequently, you can add it to a My Cities list which kind of mimics the iPhone’s built-in world clock.

Sun & Time does what it promises in a fairly plain but accurate way… I double-checked it against the U.S. Naval Observatory’s website and everything was within a minute or two… but I really think this app would have wider appeal if it was more user-friendly and did more to outshine the existing world clock that’s installed by default on every iPhone and iPod Touch.

In the user-friendliness department, one spot that stands out is that all of the times shown under My Cities are in 24-hour time. I’m finally at a point in life where I can figure out in my head that 18:30 means 6:30 pm, but “military time” has always bugged me! A 12/24 hour toggle would be very welcome here.

Another gripe in the My Cities department, aside from it being pretty blah visually, is that the order of the cities can’t be changed. Right now I have Seoul, Chicago, Athens, Oslo, and Adelaide listed in My Cities, and that’s the order they have to stay in unless I want to delete and re-add cities that will subsequently be appended to the end of the list.

Y’know what I really want the My Cities section to do? I want it to mimic the iPhone’s world clock a LOT more closely than it already does! There are a lot of great apps out there that recycle conventions already established by Apple’s default apps and the reason they do it is that Apple’s app geeks are true masters of the craft, so following their lead makes total sense.

I realize that reinventing the world clock and integrating it with Sun & Time’s map is way easier said than done, but I believe that’s what would make this app truly worthwhile for everyone who has a friend or three living in other parts of the world… take Apple’s very familiar world clock interface, make it better with the sunrise and sunset and calling codes and all that, and tie it all to the world map with its ever-changing areas of sun. Even cooler would be a world map that’s one single unit that supports pinching rather than a series of static submaps, and showing some My Cities time data on the map itself would be sweet!

Right now, though, I have the app and I *kind of* like it but I can’t really say that Sun & Time does enough to fully justify the $2 pricetag when the default world clock from Apple also shows time, today/tomorrow, and day/night. Now, if you really want to know when sunrise and sunset are happening around the world then this app is precisely what you’re looking for… but I have a hunch that people want more than that. The concept of providing a visual real-time guide to global day and night is cool, but I really feel like the current execution needs an overhaul and some fancying up before the masses will flock to it.

iTunes Link – Sun & Time
Version 1.01
Reviewed on iPhone 3G OS3.1

Tags: $1.99