This is just a little review of an iOS app called Klok I came across when browsing the app store on my phone. I was intrigued by its name so I installed it and it turned out to be quite useful.
What’s the problem it solves? When you have friends or business relations in multiple timezones you’d like to have a quick overview of the time in their timezone. So you’d like to access the world clock quickly.
This app does just that by adding a widget to the notification center. It brings back the memories of the Apple World Clock of older iOS versions where you could have analog vs digital faces and day and night are represented with white and black backgrounds.
You can order them from west to east so you don’t have to mentally figure out which ones are the furthest apart.
But it takes the convenience a bit further. When you tap and hold a clock face, the city, time and time zone is copied. And since Mac and iPhone share the clipboard, you have it right there. This is the result of a tap on the LA clock at the time of writing:
Los Angeles 00:23 (GMT-8)
But there’s more: when you tap a clock face a list of hours appears underneath and the face you tapped is selected. Now you can set the time for that clock and all the others move with it. This makes it very easy to find the answer to questions like ‘what time is it LA when it’s 5pm in New York’. Just select the New York clock, tap to set the AM/PM switch to PM and tap 5. Watch the clocks change and you can see that at 5pm in New York, it’s 2pm in Los Angeles.
Some very important uses come to mind: what’s the time here when Allison starts her live show? At what time does the Apple keynote start in my timezone?
There is a small caveat: due to the widget setup, the number of time zones you can setup is maximized to 5.
Another niggle: unless you live in a big city, the app might refuse to find the particular town you want to set. You can work around this by selecting a major city in the same timezone.
And all this is available for free.
Now, what intrigued me to install it? Well, that would be its name: Klok. This is Dutch for clock so I wanted to find out if it was made by a Dutch developer. It’s not, in fact, it’s a company based in Singapore.