Vela Design Group releases VelaClock 1.6 for Mac OS X "Tiger"
Berkeley, California - April 28, 2006 - Vela Design Group announces VelaClock 1.6, a Dashboard widget. This is a free update for current VelaClock customers.
VelaClock 1.6 introduces one small but interesting feature. The change in minutes of daylight from the previous day can now be displayed in the Light Level pane. For example, "+4" indicates that the currently selected city experienced 4 more minutes of daylight than the previous day. This unique feature allows users to see the daily increase or decrease in minutes of daylight for cities around the world.
VelaClock is a world clock widget with a highly configurable user interface. Besides displaying local times, users can quickly display the time of sunrise, sunset, or twilight, duration of daylight, current phase of moon, time zone information and much more. The interface can easily be configured to use a minimum amount of screen space or if the user wishes, multiple lower panes can be opened to display more information and take up more screen space.
The top pane of VelaClock displays a list of cities and corresponding local times. For more detailed information about the currently selected city, the user can choose whether to display up to four additional panes (each pane has a full and a minimized version):
- A light level bar that gives the user a picture of the 24 hours of natural light (bright daylight, three kinds of twilight and night) for the current day. A thin white bar indicates when the moon is visible. Daylight duration and the change in minutes of daylight from the previous day are also displayed.
- Specific times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset. Begin/end times for civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight can also be displayed.
- An image of the moon as seen in the sky above the currently selected city. This image accurately depicts the angle of the moon's crescent. Because this angle can change dramatically within the span of an hour, it is updated once a minute, as is the moon's phase. This view also contains the name of the current phase, as well as local times for the next and previous phase events (new, quarter, full).
- An analog clock and time zone information. The relative time shows the number of hours the selected city is ahead or behind the current time zone, as set in System Preferences.
In the February 2006 issue of Macworld, VelaClock 1.4 was reviewed in Dan Frakes' Mac Gems column and received a four-mice rating. VelaClock frequently appears in Apple's Top 50 widgets page and was an Apple Staff Favorite in March 2006. VelaClock 1.0 was released on the same day that Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released, April 29, 2005. Since that day, VelaClock has progressively improved with five significant updates.
VelaClock is a unique widget in that it is completely self-contained. Many widgets are light weight front-ends to web services; such widgets require an internet connection. By contrast, VelaClock is designed to function without an internet connection, and so is particularly useful for laptop users away from their home or office. Astronomical calculations are performed by an internal code module.
VelaClock was designed specifically for Tiger users and was built using the Apple Xcode toolset. VelaClock requires Mac OS X "Tiger" version 10.4 or newer.
VelaClock is priced at $6.95 and is available now directly from the Vela Design Group website, at http://www.veladg.com.