The iPad is magical and revolutionary, sure, but it’s missing a few things. Apple seemed to neglect a stocks app, a weather app, and most importantly, a clock app. Luckily, the team at Spoon Juice and SourceBits have teamed up to create one of the best looking clock apps I’ve ever seen.
On the surface Night Stand is just another clock app. Luckily, it’s much, much more than that. Night Stand is chock full of subtle little UI elements and features that make it extremely useful. The weather feature is completely unobtrusive, but also incredibly useful. The little cloud followed by the temperature has helped me make the snap decision between a jacket, a long sleeve shirt, or just a tee, three days in a row now.
Another awesome feature is Math Problem Alarms. Actually, it’s only awesome until you wake up at 5:30am and have to solve 76 times 89 in order to shut the damn app up. Even so, this is the best feature in the entire app for me, as I have a horrible tendency to just slap the snooze button and show up an hour late for everything. It’s very nice to be able to create a bunch of alarms, set the daily repeats and turn them off and on at my discretion. I have two different 1st period classes so I can set an alarm for the class that starts at 7:30 and only have it go off on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Not only does Night Stand have a bunch of super cool features like Math Puzzle Alarms (I just love capitalizing that), but it also has an extremely good looking stop watch function. It has an unlimited lap marker complete with a drawer that displays your laps.
Not just the stopwatch, but the entire app is sexy as heck. It comes with 8 designs other than the stopwatch that are fully featured clocks with the weather function. When using the app as a nightstand you can double tap to dim the screen. On iOS 4 the app can run in the background and start your alarms even with the device locked, however on the iPad the app must stay open. This doesn’t bug me as much as I thought it would as I just dim the brightness and set it on my Compass stand next to my bed. It works great as a replacement for a real clock. I love laying in bed watching the binary clock click up the seconds, or seeing the nixie tubes glow as I fall asleep.
I can’t recommend Night Stand HD enough, especially if you’re a lover of being on time.
Available at $1.99 in the App Store.
