Lunar’s First Apple Watch App is a component Sundial, part Time laptop

It used to be the middle of the nightnodemind was once frazzled with jet lag. He could not get again to sleep. The president of international design firm Lunar lives in San Francisco, but this was his fifth go back and forth to Beijing in only some months, and his circadian rhythm was once all out of whack. “I woke up in the course of the night time, did some difficult psychological math, and made up our minds it used to be around 2 within the morning,” Edson remembers. a lot of time to get some shut-eye. So Edson popped a melatonin, shut his eyes, and simply as he was once drifting off, obtained a name on his lodge telephone. “Mr. Edson. it is time so that you can wake up.”

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. Over the course of the exhausted day that followed, Edson’s jetlag nightmare lay the genesis for Lunar’s graceful app, Onetime. available now for iPhone and coming to the Apple Watch as quickly because it launches, Onetime is a gorgeous and modern app that is one section sun dial, one section world clock, and one part time machine.

What folks think of as time is truly just a construct in keeping with one thing: where the sun is within the sky. Onetime makes use of the solar as a person interface part, allowing you to dial the solar around a half-tone circle (representing day and evening) to see what time it is going to be when it reaches that position in the sky. but in Onetime, there is not just one solar in the sky: there are as many as you want. you can fill the dial with lesser stars, every showing the time in a city you want to track. And this is the ingenious phase. faucet any sun and drag it around to any time, and it mechanically drags the other stars along with it.

for instance, let’s say you are living in Hong Kong, and also you wish to work out a time all the way through work hours to talk to a shopper in San Francisco. via just dragging the sun across the Onetime dial, you’ll discover simply see that the only time you two can talk throughout regular industry hours round 9 a.m. in Hong Kong, and 5 p.m. in San Francisco. (but when you need to tag to your associate in Munich, he’s going to have to get up in the midst of the evening.) To set an appointment, just hit the “Share” button, and it is going to electronic mail everybody what time they need to be on the decision, right from throughout the app.

Edson and his staff have filled the UI with slick little touches. Drag the solar beneath the dial’s day-night horizon, for example, and the spot where the little yellow orb disappears below the skin will suck down, then jump again, just like a small ball being pulled underwater. there’s even a wedge of shadow around the dial that all the time follows the place the sun is in the sky.

Onetime is lovely on the iPhone, but where it in reality seems find it irresistible belongs is to your wrist. that is why Lunar intends on making Onetime its first Apple Watch app. “part of the impulse to get this going was truly the Apple Watch,” Edson says, admitting that Lunar’s design staff has been working on Onetime due to the fact that Apple’s smartwatch was just a rumor. “We developed Onetime the use of [Apple’s new programming language] Swift, as a result of we in reality wanted to test our mettle.” With the authentic launch within reach, Lunar thinks the Onetime app will achieve Apple Watch improve proper across the time they begin doping up on Apple retailer shelves. Given how well now not simply time, but a dial interface lends itself to the wrist, the Apple Watch could be the medium where Onetime truly belongs.

you can obtain Onetime totally free on the iTunes App store.