Atlas Map

I’ve never been a good sleeper. What helps me most is the sun: getting light at the right time of day is the closest thing I have to a reset button for my circadian rhythm.

This gets complicated when you travel constantly. Every trip means a different sunrise, a different sunset and a new rhythm for my body to adjust to. Before I ever land somewhere, I wanted a way to set expectations: when the light was coming up, how much daylight there is, and what the climate is like there.

That drove me to build Atlas Map, a world clock for iPhone, macOS and Apple Watch that shows the time, daylight and weather for every city in the world, and lets you time travel to witness all three at once.

It’s not just a clock.

A standard world clock would tell you that it’s 6:14 PM in Tokyo, but it doesn’t tell you the sun will be setting in the next fifteen minutes, that tomorrow will have two minutes less sunlight, or that this week will be 63° and clear.

That’s the information I needed. Not just the time, but what it’s like there. I want to know how much sunlight I can expect during my travels, how cold it will be, and whether it’ll be clear or not.

Every single screen in Atlas Map answers those three questions at once, for as many locations as you want.

Rewind, and fast forward.

At the bottom of all three tabs sits the rewind bar, a single slider that lets you seek 24 hours into the past or into the future, for every city at once.

Dragging it updates the time, sunlight and weather — and other smaller details — in real time. You can tap the date to open a calendar that goes as far as a century into the past or a century into the future.

List

A standard view commonly used by Apple; they apply it in their Weather app and Clock app. Each city gets a card with its own time, a strip showing the daylight from sunrise to sunset, and the weather. Around each card glows the city’s daylight at present — blue at noon, amber at sunset — making the List tab easy to scan without even having to read the details in the card.

The top card is home base. It glows brighter than its peers and has movement. This is decided by the user’s current location, but I’ve also given them the option to override it by dragging another location to the top, especially if they wish to turn location services off.

Tapping any of these locations opens the detailed page.

Map

The Map tab is a satellite globe you scale, rotate and twist with your finger. City lights appear as it gets dark, and the stars behind the Earth turn at the real scale. The satellite images even change with the seasons, so snow creeps in during the winter.

Each city’s label is filled with its own sky, shaded from what the skies look like there. Tapping one opens a miniature daylight chart and the next twelve hours of weather. Tap it again to open the detailed page.

Clock

The Clock tab puts every city on a single clock face, one hour hand each and a single seconds hand, so you can see at a glance which cities are awake.

Underneath, I struggled to come up with a way to display daylight and weather here. I compromised by removing the weather statistics and focusing purely on daylight. A ruler places each city by daylight, from midnight through sunrise, noon and sunset to midnight.

Two cities can share a time zone and still sit apart, because the sun may reach one well before the other. That difference is exactly what I care about when I’m trying to reset my body clock.

Details

The details page is broken up into three parts: Daylight, Weather and This Year.

The Daylight chart shows the sun’s path across the entire day. You can place your finger on the chart and seek to see the light at any hour.

Below that is the weather, showing the next 24 hours and the next week in one card.

Then comes This Year: the year’s daylight curve, with the temperature laid over it, and markers on the warmest and coldest days so far. Touch the curve and you can drag up to a century behind or forward, and the year starts to roll.

Unnoticed details.

The things I spent tons of time on, even though nobody will notice.

Aligned sunset labels

In Map view, each label is colored in using the daylight from that day. What I’m most proud of is how it actually aligns with the Earth’s shadows: it mimics real sunset skies directionally, with a view from the satellite.
Earth’s glow

The glow on the Earth works exactly like the top card slot in the List page. It glows based on your priority location, set by default to the user’s location. I did this for two reasons. You can compare and contrast the sky of your chosen location with one on the other side of the map, which would otherwise only be possible in List view or Clock view. And it steps away from too much realism — I like that it glows, it looks awesome. This is also a feature on the Clock view, glowing the user’s current location.
Time zones

A slightly hidden feature. The times of different cities are cool to look at on the map, but look how strangely the time zones are physically divided.
South Pole

Yeah, nobody lives there. But Antarctica was the only continent that didn’t have anything. I applied the exact conditions of the South Pole, and it is truly fascinating: six months of pure darkness, six months of daylight. I’d be happy if I taught somebody a thing or two.
Lock and unlock

When I was a kid, I perceived my home town of New Haven the other way round, because I thought the body of water between Connecticut and Long Island was the Atlantic Ocean. For that reason, I didn’t want to restrict any possible globe movement. Most maps that can scale out to a full globe have a locked Y axis; you need that so users can spin the globe without losing all sense of orientation. I found it limiting. People perceive things in different ways, so I allow full scaling with added pinching mechanics. And if you ever get lost, you can simply relock the globe to its fixed Y axis.