Posted by Ryan Johnson on 10 30, 2009

Summertime

Categories: Reference, | 4 comments | |

Summer, summer, summer time, Summertime! I don’t know about you, but I absolutely hate daylight savings time (DST)! Why? Because I ALWAYS forget it. It’s no sweat in the fall when you gain an hours sleep, but in the spring when you lose an hour; pure hatred!

Well, one thing’s for sure, this year daylight savings time won’t be as traumatic thanks to Summertime! Summertime, an app created by Oliver Drobnik (A.K.A – Dr. Touch), is your anywhere anytime DST calculator. No matter where you live in the world, all you have to do is fire this bad-boy up and it tells you exactly how many days, hours, and minutes until the next DST switch! It even gives you helpful hints like “You can sleep an hour longer”.

Summertime isn’t jam-packed with fancy bells and whistles. It does all of it’s voodoo magic behind the scenes. Each time you open the app it taps into the iPhone’s ginormous internal timezone database and figures out whether or not DST applies where you live, and if it does when it takes place. Whether you live in the U.S. or in Europe, Summertime knows all of the magic dates. And, for the persistent mom inside all of us, Summertime has an email feature built right in so you can send all of your friends and family a reminder of the upcoming time switch! Think about it. You’ll be a hero! Ok, ok…that might be a stretch.

Alright, so what do you get when you download Summertime. Well as mentioned, you basically get one-touch access to the exact day/time/minute of the next DST switch, and the ability to send reminder emails. Yeah…I know it’s not something that you”ll use everyday, but I guess it serves it’s purpose twice a year. We definitely think this app would be best positioned as a free app instead of a paid. However, if a few more gizmo’s were added to it we think it’d do just fine as a paid app.

So, you might be wondering what gizmo’s we think would take it up a notch. Well, we’d love to have the ability to change timezones from within the app, so if you’ve got friends and family on other continents, you can more easily send them a reminder. The way Summertime works currently is you can only send reminders for the timezone that your iPhone is set to. Another feature that would really spice it up would be the ability to schedule reminders. If you could setup in advance your email distro list, select their time zone, and auto send reminders when the time is right, this app would rock! Nonetheless, Summertime does exactly what it says it does, and it does it very well. No issues, no bugs, just super quick access to current info for the next upcoming DST. If you’re looking for a DST reminder then download Summertime today!