Vela Design Group releases VelaClock 1.8 for Mac OS X "Tiger"
Berkeley, California - August 2, 2006 - Vela Design Group announces
VelaClock 1.8, a Dashboard widget. This is a free update for current
VelaClock customers.
VelaClock is a world clock widget with a highly configurable user
interface. The top pane of VelaClock displays a list of cities and
corresponding local times. Multiple lower panes can be opened to
display more information and take up more screen space. Users can
quickly display the time of sunrise, sunset, or twilight, duration of
daylight, current phase of moon, time zone information and much more.
What's new for VelaClock 1.8:
- Updated Daylight Saving Time rules for Canada, Guatemala, Haiti,
Iran, Nicaragua and Tunisia. - Show correct time for Sri Lanka
(effective April 14, 2006). - Fixed error in "change in minutes of
daylight" calculation. This error only affected cities that had a
change of -1 minute of daylight. - Improved purchase and registration
process. - Enhanced clock hand graphics.
The interface of VelaClock can easily be configured to use a minimum
amount of screen space or if the user wishes, more detailed
information about the currently selected city can be displayed. The
user can choose whether to display up to four additional lower panes
(each pane has a full and a minimized version):
1. 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. 2. Specific times for sunrise,
sunset, moonrise and moonset. Begin/end times for civil twilight,
nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight can also be displayed.
3. 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). 4.
An analog clock and detailed time zone information, including full
time zone name and the number of hours the selected city is ahead or
behind the user's current time zone (as set in System Preferences).
The current season name (winter, etc.) is also displayed.
VelaClock frequently appears in Apple's Top 50 widgets page, has been
an Apple Staff Favorite three times, and was recently a 'Featured
Widget' on the Apple Dashboard Widgets page. In the February 2006
issue of Macworld, VelaClock 1.4 was reviewed in Dan Frakes' Mac Gems
column and received a four-mice rating. In issue 123 of Design
Graphics magazine, VelaClock 1.4 received a favorable review in John
Feld's Graphics Report column. 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 more than 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 $9.95 and is available now directly from the
Vela Design Group website, at
