When I ask myself what timezone a friend (or more recently, colleague) lives in, I fire up the Clocks app on my iPhone or Every Time Zone when I’m on my Mac. In many cases, this needs quite some time and disrupts my workflow; I need to go back to my mail or calendar or any other situation which required this knowledge (meetings, mails or projects) and apply the time differences to them. Yesterday, I stumbled upon Timelanes by B-ReelProducts, immediately bought it, and from time to time while trying it out, I remembered some awkward situations in which I could have needed exactly this app to enhance my workflow.

Timelanes basically is Every Time Zone on the go — with some handy extras and a different, but in no way worse UI. When launching it for the first time, the app automatically locates your current timezone and displays it styled as a horizontal lane. This way, it centralizes your chosen hour of the day, plus indicating the exact current time with a small clock indicator. At the same time, you can easily switch between the days or come back to the current time using the arrows and the clock button at the center of the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, or you can scroll horizontally until you reach the exact point in time you need (Timelanes works both in portrait and landscape mode).

From here, comparing timezones and times is just two taps away. Using the plus button, you can search for any city in the world — not just those standard “indicating” cities like NYC or Mumbai — and add them to your lanes. Those behind your current timezone are displayed above, those ahead are arranged below it. Tap the weekday information and it will change to the actual date, so you can see when the new day begins in every timezone; swipe one, and you can delete them again. Here lays a small and more or less the only design flaw of the app: the edges of the delete button are scruffy and look pretty ugly in my opinion. Read more

I still remember the day when Chris recommended this game to me – SpellTower. When I looked at the game’s website for the first time, I asked myself whether it could be a new subject for my Inspiring UI series. Although I concluded that it would not fit the series, the website nevertheless looked like the game could be worth my time. Zach Gage, the developer, promotes SpellTower with a nice scrollable site, containing some lovely designed icons and symbols, large, mono-colored backgrounds, and some moving CSS3 flavour. It is a lovely website you should take a look at – whether you’re interested in games or not – just for the sake of admiring Zach’s work as a web designer.

But since I am interested in iOS games and I was curious to see if the game could live up to the site’s promise, I downloaded SpellTower for the ludicrously low price of $1.99 (actually, it’s currently on sale for $0.99, so please head over to the App Store to get it first, then continue reading afterwards). Allow me now to shortly recap what playing SpellTower is all about (the app features a one-minute tutorial, which also interactively explains the game’s concept). To summarize it in one sentence: to me, SpellTower is like Tetris with words.

Random blocks with letters arranged in twelve rows cover the screen, and you have to connect letters located abreast of each other. Some letters need to be included into certain minimum lengths, indicated by a small number in the top right of their square block, and words touching black boxes without letters will delete them. Blue colored letters included in a word (these are letters which are hard to incorporate into words, like “Z” or “J”) delete a whole row and generate a lot of points. Apart from those special features, the game follows one simple rule: the more letters a word has, and the more rare those letters are (a “Q” is obviously more valuable than an “E”), the more points you earn. That’s all there is to say about the game’s concept: you can start playing SpellTower within seconds, a prior condition a game needs to get you addicted to it.

This principle is translated into five different game modes, two of which you can unlock by reaching extraordinary results in the two basic ones: tower mode, where the screen is completely filled up with letters and the goal is to make as many points with them as possible; and the more tactical puzzle mode, which starts off with five rows, adding one row for each word you spell until the letters reach the top and the game ends. You can also play rush mode, which is the closest match to the idea of Tetris: rows add over time (whether you spell words or not), and you need to quickly eliminate them to prevent a letter from reaching the top. While I’m not the best at puzzle and rush mode — I do not even reach the 1000 points mark, and to unlock the fifth mode you need more than 2000 points — playing the tower mode always is a lot of unconstrained fun and makes me coming back again and again.

So, how exactly is this addiction accomplished? I think it’s a combination of three factors that Zach managed to mix perfectly: UI design, highscore competition, and a vocabulary learning process. Read more