2010-04-08
OK, first feedback question: What’s your favorite watch in Emerald Chronometer? Submit your answer via the comments (click on the Comments link to the upper right of this post; you’ll have to register the first time you comment but it’s free).
My personal favorite tends to change depending on what I’m working on. For a while my favorite was Miami, because, odd as it is, the front side can tell you a lot of stuff about what’s going on in the sky (it might be worth a separate posting at some point; you can use it to find planets in the sky and even quickly estimate the phase of the moon). But Geneva, because of its zillion complications, will probably always be the one I keep coming back to.
- Steve
steve 2010-05-27 07:58:26
I’ve not investigated them all in depth, but at the moment I’m very impressed with Terra. Good for making sure you don’t call distant relatives at inappropriate times :) Miami comes a close second - with a very nice night view…
turquoiseserpent 2010-04-23 12:06:13
I always go back to Mauna Kea, but of late it’s Miami – invaluable at-a-glance data for planetary invocations.
barfusque 2010-04-25 11:07:37
My favorite is Miami; Lots of astronomical data integrated into this clock which can make u look like a genius. Not far behind is the Geneva; This device is just downright cool. This could cange though I have to give the Terra a thorough analysis. TTYL
kk1000 2010-04-25 13:52:24
Mauna Kea. Aesthetic, form & function wrapped in an elegant package. As an amateur astronomer I simply love this watch. Fast forwarding to each solstice - particularly at extreme latitudes is blast. Let’s see the full iPad app! Thanks for all!
Zane 2010-04-26 08:55:52
Haleakala because it’s very clean. Second is probably Geneva because there’s so much to play with.
KevinKarney 2010-05-27 10:36:11
Miami is the best of a really great bunch.
But just having got an iPad. I was delighted to find the Emerald Observatory.
I hope you get the Chronometer up to iPad screen size - I would happily pay again for that !
A very happy customer
montevandeusen 2010-06-06 18:47:35
Mauna Kea. I hope to get to spend some time with some of the new ones, but I’ve been pretty busy. I too, would like to have Chronometer at full iPad resolution…
nonsequito 2010-06-24 13:24:55
Miami, I think. Though Terra is a close second. All of them are quite appetizing. Soft spot for the retro Istanbul.
marc 2010-06-30 14:06:15
I think Miami is great - the reverse face with compass points - any chance of tying this with iphone compass for assisted astronomical line-up? (I’m being altruistic here as I only have a 3G, but for all you lucky compass-bearing (..ah, bad pun..) iphone 3GS and 4’ers.
theMisch 2010-07-01 01:55:46
I like Haleakala the most. The Chronometer has been my favorite app since I bought it in November 2008. I have shown the various watches to my friends and acquaintances. Everybody is impressed. I am a bit sorry that the money is not rolling in as it should. You have an awesome product and I always feel like a little kid at Christmas when you create a new watch and update the App. I just bought your new iPad App and I am doing my part in supporting Emerald Sequoia. I am looking forward to see the iPad Chronometer version soon :-)
wesperdue 2010-08-30 14:22:01
My primary watch is Haleakala, as I find the sunrise and sunset quite useful. Next would be Chandra, for the moon data. Mauna Kea is a close third, since it has all of this information in one view; the other two may be less dense, but that makes them easier to read.
streetmentioner 2010-11-24 17:03:22
For the wow factor my favourites are Olympia and Haleakala, but the one I use most of all when my iPod Touch is in the cradle is McAlester - I just find it the easiest one to actually tell the time when you are bleary-eyed in the middle of the night.
But please do tell me an iPad version is in the pipeline - you’ve shown you can do it with Observatory!
somerstone75 2011-11-16 15:35:16
My favourite at the moment is the Geneva. But I switch between them quite a lot.
Of all the watch/clock apps I’ve bought, this it the very best by a long way.
It would be great to see a skeleton model with a Sun/Moon window.
Wolfgang 2012-12-11 19:39:12
It is the Geneva. Is it possible to engage a watchmaker to create a physical watch that is identical to the front of the Geneva? Seriously! I’ve started to research Swiss Custom Watchmakers. Is this something EC would be interested in consulting about? Please let me know. Thanks. -Wolfgang
gordonmarshall 2012-11-28 19:15:23
Looks like I am arriving quite late in the picture, I was blown away with the entire range and simply had to have the app, thanks guys. My favourite is Vienna, simple and very stylish followed closely by the Haleakala. Just wondering if you had thought of introducing an E6B slide rule function My holy grail wrist watch would be a simple (very simple) chronograph GMT with day AND date (unavailable to the best of my knowledge) and an E6B slide rule, sweeping second hand. I have a Seiko SBDM007 but the hands get in the way of the display (prefer skeletal) I like hands that are long enough to cover the indicators rather than point vaguely in the direction and also prefer that the markers are simple and not in 1/5 minuted interval. (my eyes are just not that good at seeing 1/5 minute divisions, bit like trying to read a 1/32 rule, much easier to split a 1/16 rule.
robertgroess 2012-11-30 11:04:02
I wish every iOS suite of Apps were as finely crafted as a swiss watch. Stumbled across your App and just had to have it! THIS is what Apple Apps are supposed to be about.
My favourite is the Geneva. My personal preference is a hybrid between the front and back faces. I would have the zodiac ring and sidereal subdial in front and do away with the lunation dial. Though I am sure you have great arguments about why you chose the layout that you did. In any event, fantastic work.
My favourite feature of these watches is their hands/indicators line up precisely with the quantity they are pointing to (unlike MOST mechanical watches where this lack of refinement is a pet peeve of mine). Oh and they show atomic time. I now set all my other clocks by your standard. (Well, the standard of getting NTP data over an Internet connection.. but you knew that.)
Having said that, I would pay a lot of money to buy a physical wristwatch, made of materials closely related to iPhone/iPad technology, which resembles the display in Emerald Observatory. I want one!
thompsonja 2013-02-04 07:35:16
My favourite is your next watch face which I hope will be as follows: Take Mauna Kea and remove the ring of constellations, but keep the moon phase indicator. Keep the outer night/day ring, but add an indication of which part of the night there will be moonlight. You can get this from Vienna, where the inner ring shows day, dark night, and moonlight very effectively. (By the way, the toggle for Vienna might be between 24 and 12 hour configurations). Before all that, read my posting on Time’s Face, which gives you a well-merited commendation. http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/
haraldthi 2017-08-31 04:27:18
Oh, I forgot. The Istanbul alarm clock is also very nice. As an “It’s probably an idea to get up now” in the morning, instead of the “You will have to give me attention, or you’re probably going to die soon” other alarms are gearing towards, it’s a pleasant experience. The other time keepers, the Thebes and the Olympia, also seem nice and I’m probably going to use them sooner or later. Also, if possible, it would be nice to have one clock face (preconfigured or last used) as background image and/or start screen (before you unlock the phone) instead of that darn digital one.
haraldthi 2017-08-31 04:01:11
Okay, I’ve only used it for half a day so far, and there’s much I like. I see the different clock faces as experiments in GUI, and experiments need feedback, so here it is so far. I primarily was searching for a solar time clock when I found this, for two reasons. One is that I like walking in the wilds and digital clocks make a poor compass when you navigate to the sun (or the moon and the stars).The method is both quick and trustworthy if the skies are reasonably clear, so I like it. Two, I’m self employed and the daily cycle can get strange at times. I’m also a natural thinker and stress can get too much over time if I don’t keep it low. And the concept of time keeping, with all its abstractions and simplifications and what else, can become an enemy over time instead of a friend. You don’t trust an enemy like that so you come to ignore it. A precise clock is good for appointments, but often you just need to know what time of day it is and there’s something basic and solid with the sun. We’ve used it since the beginning of man and it’s there. It’s a friend you can trust. To learn to wake up and live according to the sun, not some arbitrary human abstraction. Something solid
This means, I’m quite pleased with the Mauna Kea. I’m not using the zodiac much, but it’s there and I guess fun on a starry night. Something that would be at least as useful, and could put as a graph on a layer beneath the zodiac, is calculations of tidal waves. This could be for the place you’re at, for open sea (just to simplify things) and for 12 hours before and after current time. So that you get a split on the opposite side of the sun. I would also like an easily available switch to get rid of the second dial. Often it’s not needed, and can be rather unnerving. Some clock faces need a second dial to work properly of course, but not all, so it could be a configurable option for quite a lot of clocks.
Another clock I like, for the same reasons, is the Alexandria. It has no way of counting minutes properly, that’s often not needed so that’s fine, but then you could at least get rid of the second dial? I like it as a rather slow moving clock. I like the idea if Paris, but it’s often too simple so a compromise like Alexandria without seconds is fine.
On the list of clocks I don’t use much is Atlantis and McAlester. I see the idea of old fashioned, it’s just I’m not after old fashioned per se but a good and informative GUI, and those old folks has had ideas of GUI it’s not easy to pass by. Clock dials for decimals are cumbersome, though, even though I like to have map coordinates sometimes. (UTM as well as degrees). McAlester is fine to teach children about analog clock but I wouldn’t use it for much else. So if you have new GUI ideas, I would drop things here to make space.
Ordering is also something I would like to see. The clocks seem to be in a somewhat random order, so the ability to drag and order them would be nice. Also, geographic locations are hard to find if you don’t know the exact name, so it would be nice to be able to find them by country, alphabetically, then under there, alphabetically.
Other than that, I just have to say thanks for the good work.