seense blog

The Clock 3.1 – Go even further Release

The new summer 2016 release of The Clock is here. And what a great release!

The Clock was introduced back in 2012, as a very simple World Clock. After 4 years of free upgrades, The Clock, the Best World Clock for Mac, has grown a lot and is now speaking more than 8 languages.

For each major release, it is always an exercise for me to keep The Clock a simple and beautiful World Clock and at the same time to make it more and more powerful. This release was no exception 😉

This new release is coming with around 15 new gorgeous features, plenty of little small bugs fixed, improvements and a new planet 😉

I will focus on 2 of the gorgeous features on this blog post.

Accessibility

The first great feature is Accessibility. Starting from version 3, The Clock introduced slightly different icons to help the color blind community. Today I’m going even further in Accessibility.

As announced on my last post, from now on, I’m going to make sure that my popular apps The Clock, MenuBar Stats are supporting VoiceOver .
So, I’m pleased to announce today, that The Clock is the first seense app to fully support VoiceOver on a public release (thanks to Scott H. for the idea and testing).
For the ones who read my last post, The Clock is a far more advanced app (hundreds of features) than MenuBar Stats, and it took a little bit longer to implement the VO feature properly. But it is now implemented, and working wonderfully.
As of today VO speaks only in English, but everything is ready for more languages in the future releases.

Another feature to improve the Accessibility, is the font size of the time displayed in your menu bar. By default the size is exactly the same as the Apple stock clock. But now you have the option to increase the font size.

Dreamers

The second great feature, I want to talk about today, is for the Dreamers.
Most of you are using The Clock to improve your productivity at work. Would it not be nice to dream a little bit as well?

In The Clock 3.0 special cities, time zones were introduced for our navy friends. Today I’m going further with a new planet, Mars.

I have included in The Clock database, all the major Mars sites from NASA Mars24. So now you will know easily the local time on Opportunity, Curiosity, Olympus Mons and other Mars sites.

1 hour on Mars is not exactly the same as 1 hour on Earth so for this I especially developed new code to manage this part. This new code is based on Dr Michael Allison and Dr. Robert Schmunk algorithms.

As you know, The Clock comes with watch Complications. One of the Complication is sunrise/sunset. Would it be nice to know when the sun is going to rise on Curiosity?. This is now possible, with The Clock.

These new “cities”, or I should say Mars sites, are fully seamlessly integrated to The Clock. So you can use the Meeting Planner ;), and other features as you would do with any other cities on Earth.

This is an introductory feature, it will grow. If you have suggestions or corrections to be done on this new feature email me, Tweet,… as always I’m listening.
NB: The mission time and mission sol are not yet part of this version.

And More

So this was the 2 major features I wanted to talk about.
But as mentioned previously, there is plenty of new features. Such as Go to Date panel, Share menu, new Complications, Open your Calendar from The Clock events, simple Notes taking for a world clock, and more.
You have as well plenty of fixes for small bugs reported these last few months. And around 100 new cities in the database, and some cities time zone updates…

The new macOS Sierra came out yesterday for the developers, I will start to test The Clock on this new release soon. For the next free major update this fall.

If you like or love The Clock do not hesitate to write a nice review on the Mac App Store. It is helping me a lot. And as usual, if you have some suggestions or bug reports send me an email, it is more efficient for me to work on them.