For anyone who travels—whether crashing at a motel or a friend’s couch—there’s one challenge that ranks right up there with remembering the dental floss: finding a clock you can read in the dark.
Now comes Night Stand, from the international posse of designers and coders known as Spoonjuice, an iPhone app to solve this problem. Bonehead simple to use, this $1.99 app makes your phone an ever-trusty clock that reads vertical or horizontal and offers visual displays in three LED colors (red, green, blue), a classic LCD readout, and that staple of every 1970s flick with a wake-up scene, the flip clock.
Night Stand also lets you reset time zones, readouts to military time (24 hours) or turn the seconds display on and off.
Complaints are minor. Ignore the binary clock unless you’re an ultra-geek bent on decoding glow boxes into time while half-awake, and the LED choices are mistakenly listed as LCD. Reminder for Spoonjuice crew: LED stands for “light-emitting diode,” while LCD is “liquid crystal display,” that dark-gray-on-light gray display once favored in digital watches.
But goofs pale to functionality and fun in the Land of Apps. And Night Stand ranks on my desert-island list, as I’d want a clear display of time, day of the week and seconds if ever shipwrecked and awaiting rescue.
