Time Zones are tricky, but you already know that, don’t you? We’ve written about several time zone converters here on Beautiful Pixels already, and yet there’s always a new app that comes along and manages to delight us. And that’s exactly what Zones did.
Zones is a very simple world clock and time zone converter for iPhone. An app by Tom Izaks, Zones got a big 2.0 update today and completely revamps the app with a new design and a bunch of delightful features and themes. I’ve been using the app for a little over a week now. The main screen displays all the zones you’ve chosen and the current date & time in each zone. You can add more using the + button at the bottom. Tapping on any of the zones lets you manually pick a time, so that you can figure out what’s the corresponding time and date in the other zones. For example, if I have to know what’s the IST equivalent of 10:AM PDT, I’ll tap on San Francisco and choose the time from the picker. You can reset to the current time with a single tap.
As I’ve mentioned many a times, every time I have to publish a post, or schedule meetings or conference calls, confirming the exact time becomes a separate task in itself, because I am based in a time zone that’s GMT +5:30, whereas we cater to an audience that’s largely based in the US or Europe (and UK) — who are several hours behind us. And that 30 minute offset makes matters even more difficult. So for me, a time zone converter is a critical part of my toolset.
Zones 2.0 features four themes to choose from — Light, Stone, Classic and Dark. The first two are better than the last two by a huge margin, with Stone being my personal favorite. My only quibble with the Light theme is the shadows. Each theme is accompanied with a custom app icon that changes automatically when you change the theme, thanks to iOS 10.3+. If you have a long list of zones added, you can enable a Compact mode in the Settings that compresses the list on the main screen vertically.
Another nifty feature in Zones is the ability to sort your zones by the GMT offset, along with the Manual & Alphabetical options. Zones also ships with a handy Today Widget, but unfortunately there’s no Apple Watch app yet.
Zones is available for Free on the App Store, along with an optional $2.99 IAP option to unlock all themes and features.