BoxClock

If there’s one thing I really like playing with, that is, besides my navel, it’s time.

I’m a sucker for stuff that deal with time, or rather, the amazing ways by which it is manipulated and by which its tremendous power is utilized for whatever reason. This is in part why a number of my favorite things happen to each have time at its core. My favorite movie? Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with its time-turning deus ex machina. My favorite television show? Lost, with its time-traveling penultimate season. My favorite book? The Hours, with its time-skipping storyline. My favorite song? Time After Time, obviously. Kidding.

I love playing with time. That’s the bottomline. And I particularly love playing with time on this little iPhone app called BoxClock. Nice segue, huh? And a long, fairly time-consuming one at that.

BoxClock was developed by David Wicks originally as a Web toy. Taking advantage of the iPhone platform’s multitouch and accelerometer features, he later succeeded in porting the Web app into a working iPhone app, available in the iTunes App Store for less than a dollar.

BoxClock is so named for the obvious reason that it displays boxes and for the not-so-obvious reason that it is, in fact, a clock. To read the time on this peculiar timepiece, you must correctly count the shaded bars in the background and the boxes currently displayed. The number of bars is the present hour while the number of boxes is equal to the minutes past the hour. Try the screenshot above. You should get 8:24. Got it? Awesome.

However, I doubt you’ll turn to this thing to confirm if you’re indeed running late for an important date or if it’s almost time to watch another episode of Glee on JackTV. I myself don’t find it particularly useful as a clock. But as an iPhone app per se, I find it to be quite well done.

The color scheme of the boxes and the background can be set on the app’s settings page. There you can adjust a set of sliders to come up with your color preferences. You can go plain black and white or you can just go crazy. The boxes can also be swiped and flicked around the screen. This is where the iPhone’s touch and tilt capabilities really come into play, and the resulting movements show just how meticulous the consideration of physics that went into the development of BoxClock was.

No, with all due respect to David, BoxClock is far from being my favorite iPhone app. It is, however, my current favorite weapon in killing time, with its time-telling gradient bars and gravitating boxes.

5 October 2009 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/205064479

• Tags
• photo
• iphone
• app
• boxclock
• harry potter
• lost
• the hours

At half past ten this morning, I was nudged to waking life by Willson, my roommate and one of my college best friends. (No, he’s not a volleyball, although I wouldn’t mind if he were.) Already hungry, he asked if I wanted to join him for brunch. I grunted in agreement. Ok, I thought, let me just wrap up the dream I was having before I was rudely interrupted by somebody’s prodding. It was of my feet stepping on a birthday cake. Or a wedding cake. I forgot.

We both had galunggong and tortang talong. Then we trekked back home. He had plans for the day. I, on the other hand, did not. No doubt, today would turn out to be another one of those exceptionally lazy, slow Saturdays, when I would just lie in bed, staring at the ceiling and not even bothering to tweet (Imagine that!) about my inspired act of staring at the cobwebbed, hospital-white ceiling. Unless I think of something.

I could read. I let go of my notebook and my HSDPA modem last Sunday and agreed to let the girlfriend have them for a month or so while I content myself with emailing and uploading my posts to Tumblr using only my iPhone exactly for that reason. That I might be free from the many distractions of the Internet on a full-size browser and I could finally focus on my long queue of books to read. So far, I had finished a couple of books. Then at a quarter past twelve today, I finished my first Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

After that I decided to put off my reading until tonight and thought of watching a movie or something on Willson’s laptop. I finally got to watch S05 E01 of Lost last night (yup, just last night) and I thought it was a bit weak and unusually unsatisfying for a season opener, so I was not really keen on watching another episode. I opted instead for a movie a downloaded copy of which was given to me yesterday by Wilson. Not Willson the roommate but Wilson the officemate. You could tell they’re two different persons ‘cause their names are spelled differently. The movie’s called The Hangover. The taskbar clock said 2:37 PM when Flo Rida started going Right Round and the end credits began rolling.

Then I passed out. Or I might have just drifted off. Whatever. When I woke up an hour ago I could hear Coheed And Cambria’s Live At Starland Ballroom record booming through my earphones. And then I remembered watching what was easily the best, greatest and funniest display of surrealism I had ever seen.

I want a Kit Kat.

8 August 2009 · Comments · Permalink · http://aldr.in/158481215

• Tags
• photo
• movie
• the hangover
• lost
• the hours
• book
• friends
• me
• coheed and cambria