Daniel Eden, Designer
Deep Dive

Ora

Ora running on an iPhone and an Apple Watch Ultra. The iPhone app features a World Clock view, showing times around the world on a globe.

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.

4.6

17 reviews

Incredibly useful
This app does one thing, but it does it really well. It makes it so much easier to tell what time it will be in another time zone when it is a certain time here, or vice versa.
Widgets
It’s an amazing app with beautifully designed graphics, don’t get me wrong. But, the widgets aren’t adjusting the time to the actual time. It’s 4:23 PM as of writing this, and the widget says it’s only 4:00 sharp. Please, Dan, if you can, look further into this issue. Cheers!
Very useful App
Very useful to coordinate meeting with foreign clients
Loved the feature
Loved the clever feature of adding an event to the native calendar! Good work mate
Amazing App
Similar to the author, I work with people on different timezones, so is always annoying trying to organize agendas and scheduling sessions. Super handy app! Only suggestion would be to add some widgets so I can glance some information from my lock screen and home screen!
Great app but time isn't accurate on widget
Love the app and UI. So simple and to the point. But the time is not accurate on the widget. It rounds up the time and doesn't show the exact minute. Which kinda defeats the purpose of using a world clock.
Great app!
Amazing app. Love the home widget too. Just a bit of feedback, it’d be amazing to be able to have multiple cities/time zones on the smaller widgets!
Widget not showing correct time
The widget is not showing the correct time.
Clean
Such a clean app works just as it says
A suggestion
Great App Dan.. a suggestion to look at a layout from an app called time buddy it’s another layout that is quite useful..
The best
This is by far the best app to manage clocks and time from different parts of the world. I immediately uninstalled TimeBuddy once I tried Ora. Thanks a ton for your amazing work Dan!
Time travel is real
The feature is exactly what I needed. To see difference with a manual scale!
Snappy and Great
I love this app. The snappiness of this app makes me feel its a native world clock app. A must download!
A nifty way to coordinate time zone differences!
Ora makes it super easy to track the time across the globe, in a beautifully crafted, inmate experience! From widgets to calendar sync, there’s som awesome, delightful sprinkles to be had!
A lovely way to work out timezones and workday overlaps
A pleasure to use, thank you!
BEST. WORLD. CLOCK. APP. EVER. PERIOD. DONE!
I’ve tried many. many free ones I should add. never tried paid apps for this. Never did, never will. Why never will? Cause this app does it all and it’s free. Absolutely install it. Even if you have no real reason to install such apps, do it anyways cause it’s awesome man. It will help you at some point when you’re in need. My compliments to the devs
The app requires an urgent fix
The widget displays only the hours and does not indicate minutes. As a result, when it is 2:30 PM, it will simply show 2:00 PM.

Ora is free to download on the app store.