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The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

hodinkee.com

51–60 of 85 posts

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#51

Wow this makes me want to buy an Apple Watch! 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…

"Yes" make traditional watches with solar faces, if you don't want a smartwatch. https://www.yeswatch.com

[deleted]

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#52

Wow this makes me want to buy an Apple Watch! 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…

I've been using LunaSolCal for many years. It's a quite extensive ephemera. (iOS, Android, and Windows)

https://www.vvse.com/products/en/lunasolcal.html

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#53
post #44
post #3

Does anyone know of a website/js remake of this watch face?

That was a fun little challenge, this should be a decent approximation: https://svelte.dev/repl/dea0bd9caf8c49c980eb247a63b1e537?ver...

Gedy, thank you, I love the result! And that SunDial.svelte is <100 lines formatted, too! \o/

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#54

Wow this makes me want to buy an Apple Watch! 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…

> 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?

Check out Sol and Sundial:

https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/sol-sun-clock/id491537291?l=en

https://apps.apple.com/nl/app/sundial-solar-lunar-times/id97...

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#55

Wow this makes me want to buy an Apple Watch! 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…

Google's weather widget has fairly detailed sunrise/sunset information.

https://imgur.com/a/Kp53K6B

https://www.androidauthority.com/google-weather-app-965754/

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#56

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 i…

That's a super cool chart, thanks for sharing. Never saw that before.

This one might be cooler: https://plus.maths.org/issue11/features/sundials/eqtime.gif

Time adjustment you need to make to a sundial by month

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#57
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a super cool chart, thanks for sharing. Never saw that before.

This one might be cooler: https://plus.maths.org/issue11/features/sundials/eqtime.gif Time adjustment you need to make to a sundial by month

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.

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But light depends on location. How can it tell you the light if you won't tell it where it is?

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".

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#59
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.

Re: The Eerie Beauty of the Apple Watch Solar Face, and the Anatomy of Nightfall

#60
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like abstract watchfaces for the Versa, you might want to checkout TTMM: https://ttmm.is/

$1.99 a month for watch faces? WTF!!!!

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.

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