If I schedule a videoconference meeting for next Tuesday at 3pm in New Orleans, what time will that be for the folks joining me for the meeting in Tokyo and Melbourne and San Francisco? Rather than conduct the mental math yourself (and risk forgetting about accounting for daylight savings time or otherwise making a mistake in the process), you can use an iPhone app to do the work for you. Although there are quite a few time zone apps in the App Store, the app that I’m reviewing today, Zones, works very well and has a nice interface. The developer is Squircle Apps LLP, which I mention up front because there are a lot of apps in the app store that have “Zones” in the app name. The link at the bottom of this post (and right here) will open the App Store to the app that I am reviewing today.
Cities
When you launch this app, the top part of the iPhone screen lists cities—specifically, cities that you select by using the plus sign at the top right. You don’t have to select your own city for this list, but I like doing so because it makes it easy for me to compare the time in my city (New Orleans) to another city.
Once you have cities in the list, you can tap and drag any of them up or down if you want to change the order. Or, if you select the settings icon at the top left (the gear), you can choose how to sort them. My favorite is to show the time zones East to West, but you can also show them West to East or alphabetically.
You can also choose to use a 12-hour time format or a 24-hour time format.
If you tap on the name of a city, you can rename the city. For example, if Jacques lives in Paris, you can add the city Paris and then rename it to “Jacques.” This makes it faster to schedule meetings involving Jacques in the future without needing to think about what city he is in.
Calculations
The bottom portion of the screen helps you to perform time calculations. This is the part that you use if you are scheduling a meeting for a specific time in the future. This part of the app lets you select a time in your time zone and then see what time that would be in a different time zone. First, select the date in your home city by pressing the button at the middle of the bottom of the app. Next, tap the time underneath the words “Your Time Zone” to select the time you were thinking of. Finally, scroll the white ball from left to right to change the time and see what impact that has in the other time zones that matter to you. As you do so, the background will change from a light color (when the sun is up) to a dark background (at night) so there is far less risk of you thinking that you selected 3pm when you instead selected 3am.
As you select the time at the bottom, the items at the top will change as well to reflect what time (and in some cases, what day) it will be at the other locations.
If you tap the share button, you can easily create a text or email that states the selected time in your own time zone and what that means for the other time zones. You can then edit what the app added automatically and type the rest of your text or email without worrying about whether the time calculations are correct. This is a nice feature.
Widgets
If it is helpful for you to have even faster access to the current time in another location, Zones also includes widgets. Select a city, and the widget will display the current time in that city along with an icon indicating whether it is night or day. The widget also tells you how far ahead or behind that location is, should you wish to do some mental math.
Reminders
The Zones app also has a reminder feature that makes it easy to select a time for a certain event based on a time zone. For example, if you want to send your friend in Brazil a happy birthday email just as the clock strikes midnight in Brazil, this app can help you to create such a reminder.
Cross-platform
Zones works on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. And it uses iCloud to sync. Thus, once you select your favorite cities on one device, that populates to your other devices as well. Here is what Zones looks like on an iPad:
Conclusion
If you ever work or communicate with people in different time zones, this is a great little app. The interface is clean and simple, and the app has just the right amount of features: some powerful ones that make sense, but not so many features that the app becomes hard to use.
Click here to get Zones ($4.99 in the App Store).