Ora

Every February in the Eden household, we look forward to tuning in to softball season. Being based in the UK makes it difficult to watch all the games; ESPN and other exclusive rights holders make it notoriously difficult to stream games outside of the US. But there’s another, more everyday problem: what time the games are happening.

The world clock features built-in to our phones and computers are great at letting us know what time it is now around the world, but less useful at answering questions like: What time will it be in London when it’s 5pm in Clearwater, Florida?

After a couple of years of scratching my brain about these annual questions, I decided to do something about it by building an app.

It’s about time

When I was building Solstice, many of the bugs I encountered had something to do with time. Part of this was due to the Time Travel feature, which allows people to travel through time up to 6 months into the past or future, to see how the daylight changes.

Spending months solving these bugs and making Time Travel work as intuitively as possible made me eager to incorporate the feature into another app.

It was fun taking a feature I’d built for traversing time on the order of days and months, and adapting it for traversing time on the order of hours.

It’s all in the details

Ora is a wildly simple app—it’s a lot like Solstice’s initial 1.0 release, just focusing on doing one job well. Creating something really simple meant I could dedicate less time to building features and fixing bugs, and more time to adding small details that many will never notice, but reward those who do.

One of Ora’s more subtle details is the relative delay of clocks. The further away from GMT the time zone is, the longer it takes for the time change to animate. It’s still only a matter of milliseconds, but adds a sense of distance between the locations.

I spent a while adding a subtle highlight edge to the clocks that appear on the globe. As time travel is adjusted, this highlight slowly moves around the edge of the container, suggestive of the way the sun’s light changes throughout the day.

There are a couple of places where an animated version of the Ora app icon shows up. The top navigation icon that toggles the World Clock view animates while Time Travel is used. The more obviously-animated version appears on the “About” screen, and hides some details of its own.

As each “segment” of the globe animates from one edge to the other, its opacity fades from semi-transparent, to opaque, and back again. The stroke width also varies ever so slightly, suggestive of it actually rotating out of view on a sphere.

The Time Travel UI didn’t look right occupying the full width of the screen on Ora for iPad, so I made it smaller. It was hard to decide whether it should live on the left or right bottom corner, so instead, I let people put it in their corner of preference, making sure it was possible to “flick” it from one side of the screen to another.

On iPhone, I wanted to have the Time Travel bar always visible (unlike in Solstice), which meant it had to be as unintrustive as possible. I really like the playback bar in Apple Music and borrowed some of the same details for Ora, including the progressive blur that obscures content as it scrolls underneath it. One detail I added was to give the bottom corners an exaggerated radius to match the radius of the screen.

Ora is free to download on the app store.