There really is something eerily beautiful, as the author states, about simple layouts that convey the immediate information sought as well as the intuition behind the abstraction.
Another I'd throw out there are the charts for latitude vs. hours of sunlight per day by month[0].
I have never wanted a tattoo, but that's an icon that I'd consider - maybe overlay each city in which one's lived, and periodically update it..
One of these days I’m going to sit down and find the time to build an alarm clock app based on these charts. One that lets you sleep longer in the winter, and less in the summer. I’ve spent time up in Alaska and that was the first time I altered my sleep schedule based on daylight hours. I’ve always believed there was something to that.
> I’ve always believed there was something to that.
Wouldn't surprise me, Humans don't have (by the standards of many mammals we share the surface with) particularly great night vision and prior to fire we'd have had no source of illumination but the moon/stars at night.
Basically stay in your cave/shelter til you can see whatever you are stalking/been stalked by.
The connection between available sunlight and human circadian rhythm is pretty well established, or more precisely how the lack of sunlight can lead to all sort of disorders, most obviously sleep and mood disorders.
More open question is how to counteract such negative effects. Supplementing daylight with high-power artificial light seems to be one of the most promising approaches. Simply sleeping more during shorter days is fairly speculative suggestion, at least as a "silver bullet".
That being said, simply based on personal experience I would expect that slight changes of sleep length could be possible. But the effect would be more like ±30mins to sleep length, when e.g. where I live currently daylight length varies from about 6 to 18 hours. Trying to match sleep to such a big swing seems pretty unlikely to succeed.
In the military knowing first-light and last-light, down to within a few minutes, is essential daily. I have an app on my phone that tells me sunrise and sunset, but as the article describes these aren't the same thing. I also have a very expensive top-of-the-range Garmin watch and even that just tells me the less useful sunrise and sunset, which makes me suspicious it's not as military as it markets itself as.
I don't know if anyone knows an app that gives first-light and last-light for the phone, so I don't have to buy a new watch?
I don't know if anyone knows an app that gives first-light and last-light for the phone, so I don't have to buy a new watch?
I'd like one that takes into account terrain. All of the apps I've seen believe the world is a perfectly smooth. I live in a place with mountains, and my "last-light" time at certain points of the year can be as much as 50 minutes earlier than any app will predict.
It could be written. There is a dataset of world elevations at 1km resolution that I saw being used for calculating the horizon distance from arbitrary points. Searching just now it turns out that was low resolution data, 30-arcseconds and 1 arcsecond, 30m resolution is available! https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/where-can-i-get-global-elevation-d...
I like The Photographer’s Ephemeris (https://www.photoephemeris.com/) which includes times for astronomical twilight, nautical twilight, civil twilight, as well as moon and sun rise and set times, golden hour, shadow estimation based on landmark position and height, and so many more great features. A very handy tool for location/photo scouting. Has a web app, APIs, and all the usual platform apps, too.
Suntimes on Android is very nice: https://github.com/forrestguice/SuntimesWidget and shows "sunrise and sunset, twilights (civil / nautical / astronomical), blue and golden hour, solstices and equinoxes, moonrise and moonset, moon phases and illumination."
That's really cool as well. I like the video explanation. Too many websites fail to explain what the product actually is and this simple site did a good job. Basic ecommerce done well here.
That said for nearly $700USD I'd rather go for a smart watch. Even though I understand why you wouldn't want one for privacy, distraction/addiction, or whatnot.
I also have a Garmin and it gives me sunrise, sunset, and twilight on the same screen, and you can advance forward to view times for future dates. I use it all the time for planning. I think you might just not have configured yours to display what you want.
Apple certainly can make very pretty watchfaces. Especially in the areas where it seems that they are inspired by physical, classical watches: there’s a bunch there that you can basically see as very attractive to traditional watch people. But the other faces? Eh, they’re kind of mediocre. I never really understood why Apple is so dead set on shipping watch faces that aren’t very good while also denying people the ability to make good ones :(
Take a look at some of the android watch faces people have made. They make Apple Watch faces look amateur in comparison. I also don’t understand why Apple has closed that ecosystem. It means I’m stuck with the mediocre watch faces of the 3 series forever.
Yay, their Sun is white. Way to go Apple. Though the adjacent yellow line and fuzz may still reinforce the pervasively common 'Sun is yellow' misconception. But that's still better than the yellow and orange disks of other apps people have linked to. Including Google's android and web search weather widgets. :/
Therein lie my hopes and fears for AR's educational impact. Things done well with care, becoming ambient informal education. Here twilights, day lengths, Sun color, cause of night. Versus ambient cognitive pollution, as collateral damage from design choices, and from the usual carelessly wretched education content.
A timely read, as I just got a Fitbit Versa as a gift and have been exploring the watch faces.
The Fitbit store has tons of them, mostly just crap IMO - the Hallmark card of watch faces as it were, with a lot of variations of "cute kitty background". But there are a few gems, including one I found that's based on a Tokyo Flash design.
And this is why I will always advocate that piracy can be a reasonable and moral choice.
Honestly disgraceful asking for a subscription to watch faces.
The value proposition here is borderline irrational, targeting the financially apathetic or incompetent only. If I never would have paid for it, and it's of no cost to anyone to take it for free, why wouldn't I? Not that this is a desired enough thing to be on the pirate seas, but the point stands.
Were I to ever release paid software, I'd probably seed the pirate copy myself with links to a pay-what-you-want page to allow others to make the value judgement themselves.
Yes, learned some brand new things about common events! Very cool, there's something about tech at a convergence of aesthetics, science and history that is really awesome.
I did wonder about one bit though, which really was driven home by their speculation about trying to do it mechanically at the end:
>"However, as a fan of astronomical complications, I can't help but wonder if this sort of complication couldn't be realized in a mechanical wristwatch or pocket watch."
Does what the Apple Watch is doing require GPS? I sort of assumed that if it's showing true noon/midnight and so on it must also be taking into account the watch's physical location and calculating with that. As someone who knows little about mechanical watches, can this be done without that, or there mechanical complications that can take a manual location adjustment as an input or the like? It's amazing to consider the kinds of creative and impressive engineering and construction that has gone into mechanical computation though. On almost the polar opposite scale, it somehow reminds me a bit of the Ars article last year mechanical analog computers for warships ( https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/05/gears... ).
Yes, it would require either a GPS or a manual setting of the location. I also imagine it's going to be incredibly difficult to process the kinds of trigonometric formulae that length-of-day and twilight calculations involve, using only mechanical gears.
On the other hand, Japanese watchmakers don't seem to be particularly averse to mixing analog with digital, mechanical with electronic. So I wouldn't be surprised if Citizen, for example, came up with a hybrid GPS/mechanical watch that does exactly what the Apple Watch does while the Swiss toil for decades trying to build a purely mechanical version.
Yeah, the Solar Dial is beautiful. But I‘ve a weird problem with it. As you can see from this screen shot:
https://ibb.co/ZBKC0xg
The horizon is not horizontal at all. Even weirder, the watch shows „Nautical Dawn“ at 9:21 PM and sunrise around 10:20 PM! I‘m currently in GMT+7 time zone and my iPhone is set accordingly (automatically) so no way the sun will rise in the middle of the night!
The App doesn’t offer much setting thus it‘s still a mystery for me.
Oh silly me! A quick look at Google would solve my problem quickly but I didn’t bother to do that. I have somehow disabled the location access for the Watch Faces. So while all the other faces shown no problem, Solar Dial NEEDS my exact location to calculate the sunrise and sunset and other related times and therefore could not work properly. Problem solved. Everything now is correct as it should be.
In 2000 we launched our first watch collection with this eerie, intuitive and deeper understanding of time. It took Apple 20 years to catch up. I am happy to see the understanding of time is expanding. Check out our watches at: https://www.yeswatch.com/wrist-watch/worldwatch/index.html#
Thanks for showing faces with the digital time numerals turned off. Seems like the perfect watch for a week at the beach, where you want to know about the sun but not be a slave to the minutes.
Some questions...
Why is it so thick? (Guessing the double stacked batteries plus a movement?) Any plans for lower profile V8?
I see some models are two batteries, one for analog hand and one for digital, one with 5 year run time, one with 1 year run time. Why two? What’s the battery situation with this V7?
How waterproof is it? Nautical time demands nautical proof packaging. See all the kits parts and lug sizes, etc., but not waterproofness.
Fascinating concept, feels like what would have been a ‘maker’ project on Kickstarter if it existed circa Y2K. Back then, though, you’d find these kinds of “who thought of that things you didn’t know you needed” in Sharper Image, which suckered me into more than a couple off beat watches. As a collector of both analog and novelty time pieces, I’d pick this up but feels more like $45 to $295 (depending on materials) rather than $695, even in “today’s dollars”.
> One wonders what the rationale for this might be. Certainly, the distinction is unlikely to matter to the victim of a burglary – perhaps the view is that in operating at night, the criminal is somehow cheating, or demonstrating a lack of nerve, and therefore more morally culpable?
A burglar robbing a house at night is more likely to encounter occupants. The law is such to discourage home invasions, accidental or not.
A criminal operating at night is less likely to get caught. Making their punishment more severe means the overall risk they face, the product of probability of getting caught and sentence if they do, constant over the whole day.
There is still no apple watch face that does not display the time. I filed a radar about this when the watch first launched. I don't like being a clock slave, but do rather like the idea of complications to display data and getting notifications on my wrist.
The amounts of spyware in the app store have caused me to massively scale back my use of apps now, so I almost never wear my apple watch anymore.
The main functionality I want is notifications. If I don't install apps on my phone, I'm not getting notifications on my phone, and thus can't get them on my wrist.
Additionally, keeping health tracking turned off on the watch means that, in addition to not taking your pulse dozens of times per day, you can't engage in the normal workouts either. Each time I work out it's four steps: enable health tracking, start workout, end workout, end health tracking.
This has been my favorite watch face for a while now. Some of the things I have learned over the past year:
- solar noon wanders around a fair bit around the clock noon
- the length of daylight varies quite asymmetrically between the summer and winter solstice (relative to the equinox). I realized afterwards that this is probably because of Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun.
This reminds me a lot of a watch face I have for my Garmin Venu: SHN TxD. It's _incredibly_ useful when hiking or biking. There's one piece of repeat data I have on the watch face, which is time till sunset or sunrise.
You could provide it a region or a specific location and it can give you the information for those coordinates. If you don't want to provide it location information 24/7, you should be able to deal with that "good enough" compromise.
This seems like a feature that the underlying OS should provide - if an app requests location but the user wants to provide rough region only, then the OS can simply provide, say, the center of the region instead of the true location; with a bonus that if you fly on a trip somewhere, then it can automatically supply the center of that region instead, again, without giving up the exact location.
I.e. permissions for privacy should not be treated as "grant or deny" but instead "grant true data or grant spoofed data".
It's trivial to specify location manually. Only partially related, but I get irrationally annoyed by websites repeatedly asking me to have my phone provide access to my location. In almost all cases, I'd much rather type in a 5 digit zip code and be done with it.
Hmmm but I think people using this feature will be extremely sensitive to it reporting it exactly for their current location. Forgetting to change your zip code and it silently telling you a light time off by five minutes could be a massive problem.
So just display a warning/confirmation prompt when the user chooses to use a fixed location rather than real-time location tracking. Or add the configured zip code to the data display.
This doesn’t seem like a safety critical feature that would warrant withholding the choice to opt out of third party location tracking
With how reliable I've seen location tracking anyway, I wouldn't bet my life on the device getting it right. I'd rather know that it is up to me, and be accustomed to updating accordingly.
Not seeing it on my watch. Just a fairly uninteresting solar graph. Maybe it's not available on my watch - but shows a real problem in modern UI design. The "shadowban" school of UI. The problem with that is discoverability. You'll never know if you're looking in the right place.
The Apple Watch sub Reddit had folks close to or in the Arctic posting their watch faces around the 21st of December. I’d imagine the same were posted for summer solstice.
If you're putting something other than those on your wrist, that's fine, and you can dork out all you want, but just please don't call it a "watch". The Apple Watch is an insult to every horologist and a disgrace to everyone with an ounce of class. :) Yes I jest, but actually not all that much.
Gatekeeping "wearing a watch"? Are you sure to be an expert on class?
Snobbery is not the best way to get people interested in your hobby. Isn't it great that people are getting excited about watches again? This article is about extending the features of mechanical watches with cool technology, while mechanical watches are not even particular good at telling you what time it is. Mechanical watches are cool, but so is UX innovation in modern watches, as the discussions in this thread demonstrate.
I posted my comment slightly in jest, because since I wear mostly G-Shocks myself, the true 'watch snobs' would look at my watches the same way I view the Apple Watch...as a toy people put on their wrist because they want a toy, and not to tell time.
Most people who wear Apple Watch have it either as a toy to play with or as a fashion/wealth statement. I bet the majority of grown-ass men you see in an Apple Watch wouldn't think twice about sporting a bead bracelet, the silly Live Strong plastic atrocity, or my favorite thing to ridicule, the little "braided string bracelet" that some influencer in Hollywood declared cool shortly after outlawing fanny packs. haha. Yes I say all this in jest, so please don't be offended. Everything is going to be ok. :)
Nah, real horologists appreciate the apple watch as much as a mechanical watch.
There are so many technologies to tell time. Most horologists appreciate the evolution of these technologies: manual, automatic, quartz, solar, eco-drive, spring-drive, and smart watches.
All of them amazing and equally intriguing and loveable.
Another I'd throw out there are the charts for latitude vs. hours of sunlight per day by month[0].
I have never wanted a tattoo, but that's an icon that I'd consider - maybe overlay each city in which one's lived, and periodically update it..
[0] http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/images/dayleng...