Vela Design Group releases VelaClock 1.0 for Mac OS X “Tiger”
Berkeley, California – April 29, 2005 – Vela Design Group today announced
VelaClock 1.0, a world clock widget that provides local times, daylight
hours and moon phase information for cities throughout the world. VelaClock
is one of the first commercial offerings of a new breed of software taking
advantage of the Dashboard feature in Apple’s Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger”.
“VelaClock’s ability to provide up-to-date time zone information will set
it apart from the competition,” said Chuck Soper, CEO of Vela Design Group.
“VelaClock will be invaluable to Tiger users who travel or communicate with
friends and colleagues around the world. Educators will find the detailed
information about the sun and moon a useful instructional aid.”
“The simplicity of creating Dashboard widgets for Tiger gives developers an
exciting new opportunity to use their imagination and talent,” said Ron
Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.
“VelaClock is a great example of an elegant and helpful widget which we’re
pleased to see added to the collection.”
VelaClock displays an image of the moon as seen in the sky above the
currently selected city. This image accurately depicts the angle at which
the moon’s crescent appears to be rotated from the vertical. Because this
angle can change dramatically within the span of an hour, it is updated
once a minute. The boundary of the illuminated region of the moon is also
updated every minute, resulting in accurate depiction of the moon’s phase.
The name of the current moon phase is provided, as well as local times for
the next and previous phase events (new, quarter, full).
A bar gives the user a picture of the 24 hours of natural light (bright
daylight, three levels of twilight, and night) for the current day. This
feature enables users to gain a better sense of daylight hours for cities
both faraway and nearby.
To accurately provide local times for locations around the globe VelaClock
depends on a public domain time zone database called “tz database.” This
database is arguably the most accurate time zone database available.
Besides local times, the relative time can be displayed. The relative time
shows the number of hours the selected city is ahead or behind the current
time zone, as set in the System Preferences. For each city displayed, the
corresponding country flag is shown.
The new Dashboard feature in Apple’s Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger”, offers
users a collection of widgets giving them immediate access to information
like stock quotes, weather forecasts, airline flight tracking, unit of
measure, currency conversions and a phone book.
VelaClock was designed specifically for Tiger users and was built using the
Apple Xcode toolset. VelaClock requires Mac OS X version 10.4 “Tiger”.
VelaClock is priced at $9.95 and is available now directly from the Vela
Design Group website, at http://www.veladg.com.