There is a good chance that even Aztecs know that Apple recently released iOS 5. According to a study conducted by advertising network Chitika a month ago, 38% of iPhone users have updated their devices to the newest OS. Let’s add 30% of iPad users and 12% of iPod touch users. Can we say that combined it gives us 80%? Well not really but I certainly hope adoption rate reaches this amount very soon.

The reason: Night Stand HD 2. I’m sorry guys, but it’s fully optimized for iOS 5. It will work on iOS 4 but believe me — it will growl on iOS5. Let’s see what we have in the bag!

Notification Center

Night Stand HD’s alarm notification system was carved in a new shape to support system-wide notifications in iOS 5. You can customize how alarms display on your screen: as banners or alerts, or you can turn them off (which sort of defeats the purpose of an alarm but if you’re that kind of guy…)

Reminders

Plain and simple: no. Our alarms were rewritten from scratch (in the process we killed that pesky bug which has been bugging you for months) and we are so proud of the current alarms implementation that we don’t feel like cutting down and using Apple’s solution. Ours is tailored for your needs, dear user. Custom alarm sounds, songs as alarms, customizable snooze and the new stellar feature…well. I don’t want to spill the beans just yet. I will write about it in the next post. Let me just say one thing: this feature is fully integrated with

Game Center

Game Center? In a clock app? You what? Exactly. We are like Luke from Modern Family: we don’t ask “why”, we ask “why not?” What had started as a twisted idea in the mind of a madman has turned into one of the coolest, most unique features ever. Certainly on the iOS clock app market, that is! We have leaderboards, achievements, tweeting and facebooking your awesome accomplishments…it’s a lot of fun for sure. More in the next post.

iCloud

If you have Night Stand HD 2 installed on multiple iOS devices and all of them are connected to an iCloud account, all your settings and alarms are synchronized. You switch between devices and you feel at home: all your stuff is exactly as you left it on the other device. That’s what iCloud is all about, right? In the background, silently, transparently, flawlessly. It’s like a ninja of syncing, isn’t it?

That’s it for tonight. Thanks for reading. Next episode: what happens if you bake in Game Center into a clock app. Stay tuned! And in the meantime, go follow Night Stand HD 2 on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter. A lot of cool stuff is coming!

Any questions? Concerns? Ask in comments!

Ladies and gentlemen,

I’m happy to officially announce that our flagship app — Night Stand HD — is going through the final stages of polish and we will be uploading it to App Store very soon. This is the biggest update to Night Stand yet: it is fully optimized for iOS 4+, sports new and utterly mesmerizing themes and has a few other features which I’m sure you will fall in love with. We poured a lot of sweat in design and implementation and we think this is the best version of Night Stand HD ever.

Head to Night Stand HD 2 Sneak Peek page to check what is new and make sure to sign up for our newsletter — we will let you know as soon as Night Stand HD 2 is available for your device.

We will post more information about new features in a series of blog posts over the next few days, so subscribe to our RSS feed to keep yourself up to speed.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Climate, our long-in-the-works landscape/soundscape/relaxation app has finally seen the light of the day! Click here to grab it from App Store now for just $0.99. Read on to learn more.

With Climate, we’ve designed a unique new tool that renders the standard cookie cutter weather app completely obsolete. Climate offers tap-free access to current time and weather conditions — including a weekly forecast powered by WeatherBug — and subtle natural acoustics with gorgeous scenery illustrated by professional graphics designers.

The first time you open Climate, simply set your location and the app will reveal its stunning default view: a natural landscape in tune with your current season and local weather.

You can decorate your view with 4 beautifully rendered potted plants that subtly grow and blossom throughout the day, and they’ll even animate with a light touch. Or if you prefer an uncluttered space, you can always opt for minimal.

Climate displays the current time and season, complete with up to the moment solar and lunar positions, plus the lunar phase. All day and throughout the night Climate will auto-update its data and refresh the onscreen graphics with actual local conditions.

Features:

✓ Select your location or auto-locate with GPS.

✓ Display the seasons as beautifully rendered, animated illustrations: winter, spring, summer, fall, plus others.

✓ Display current and extended forecast for your local area – powered by Weather Bug.

✓ Positions of the Sun and Moon change relative to current time and season.

✓ Display gorgeous photorealistic illustrations of the current Moon phase.

✓ Choose from two built-in themes: window and minimal, with more to come!

✓ Choose from 4 different types of growing, animated plants: bamboo, orchid, cactus, and petunia.

✓ Optionally display a clock on your windowsill or in minimal view, ‘sitting’ on the grass.

✓ Optional soundtrack of natural soundscapes that changes according to current weather and time of day.

✓ Ability to play tracks from your iPod library in the background.

✓ Graphics optimized for portrait and landscape viewing.

This is a good day. Yes. We have finished polishing NS 2.7 and we finally are satisfied with it enough to give it to you. We had submitted the new version to App Store around two weeks ago and today (finally!) it went live.

(Of course if you have Night Stand installed already — if you don’t, I suggest go grab it now as big things are coming in the following paragraphs)

The best alarm clock in App Store just got massively better. We answered the biggest questions of our users, provided solutions you all wanted and threw in a couple surprises. Here’s the list of new features then:

Beautiful, animated analog clock theme: Glow.

It comes as in-app purchase for just $0.99. Which is nothing considering how cool this theme is. I can show you a screenshot:

But believe me — it’s nothing. There is nothing like seeing this clock slowly fire up before your eyes in the night. It pulsates when alarm goes off and delicately fades away when you dim the screen. I think we have managed to capture a very soothing, futuristic experience here. You have to try it!

Next is a big one. Everyone wanted to

Set any song, album or playlist as your alarm and now it’s finally possible!

iPhone OS 3.0 brought a set of updates which allowed us (developers) to make you (users) even more happy with apps which make wider use of your devices. So rejoice! Go to Alarm settings, tap Sound, iPod Music and pick away!

Night Stand is helping to save your device’s battery and screen.

Set the alarm, lock the screen with lock button on top of your device and the alarm will play when it’s time. Don’t quit the app before locking the screen though — it has to be running “in the background” for the alarm to go off. Saves screen and battery — you don’t have to fiddle with cables and power blocks or docks before going to bed!

Alarm now sets off on time which is displayed on the screen.

How does it work? Quite intuitive really:
- Let’s say you live in Cupertino, CA
- you set your alarm to 7:00 AM
- you swipe the screen to show away time zone, which is set to Tokyo, Japan
- the alarm won’t go off on 7:00 AM your local time, but on 7:00 AM Tokyo time

So be wary of this rule: alarm goes off in whatever time zone which is currently displayed on the screen. In Glow theme, which displays both clocks simultaneously, alarm always plays in home time zone.

You can customize snooze now.

You can set it to activate after 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes or — if you’re confident enough — never. We suggest to have it enabled though. Combined with our powerful math puzzles, Night Stand proves to be very effective waking you up.

Improved time zone support.

We listened to your feedback and changed the way Night Stand handles time zones. It should be faster and more accurate now.

And as always — many bug fixes and performance improvements!

We’re sorry that it took a bit long but we wanted to make sure we provide the best product possible. We polished it like maniacs, seriously. We didn’t want to rush out with a quick update, instead we played down iPhone OS 3.0 initial excitement and implemented what it offers peacefully and carefully. We hope you will like it — let us know if you do or don’t!

I know it’s a bit late and all of you probably have it on your devices already but still… maybe some of you don’t! Better safe than sorry — I’d like to announce that we released a much-anticipated update to Night Stand, which comes with the following sweet things:

1. New themes: Binary Clock and Classic LCD. Have a look:

2. Away time zone mode!

Swipe your finger on the screen to change to away time zone. If you are traveling or are in a different time zone, you can set a second time zone in Night Stand’s preferences and have access to both home and away time with the swipe of your finger. Can it get easier than that?

3. Bug fixes and other minor things:

Due to popular request, we changed snooze time to 10 minutes and finally — math questions can be turned off in Alarm settings. Apart of that, we fixed over 40 small issues reported by you guys — so again thank you very much!

4. Price

We dropped the price of Night Stand to $0.99 — this promotion won’t last forever, so tell your friends to grab it ASAP!

It’s been quite difficult to bring all of these things into 2.5 and we’re going to hold with more updates until iPhone OS 3.0 is released. A few big new features are planned and already in development, so stay tuned!

The Plateau takes Android’s touch screen capabilites to a whole new level. Untangle crossed lines by moving the orbs. The degree of difficulty increases as you move to higher levels. To top it all, the background music is bound to leave you in a trance.

There are two modes of The Plateau — Challenge and Arcade. In the non-timed Challenge mode, you can leisurely work out each level and thus help build your own strategies. The strategy skills that you have acquired will help you beat the time for each level in the Arcade mode.

Every level has bonus orbs that randomly change their color — your perceptiveness and responsiveness can help you alter your score to your advantage.
You can easily resume gameplay right where you finished before. You can submit your score and check your position in the high scores list — fight against yourself or the competition, which you will have in plenty,  i.e.,  if you can let go.

Be warned, this game is highly addictive, and promises to entangle you in its web and launch you to a unique atmosphere in outer space.

If you’re reading this, I assume you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch. But is it the only gadget you possess? Come on, just say it. Gadgetophilia is a mild and hardly contagious disease. We know lots of you guys look at Android with curiosity and perhaps something directed towards lust — indeed, this phone is a very interesting, new platform. I don’t intend to compare Apple’s product to Google’s — that’s not the point of this blog and boy would it get boring!

I’m here to report that we have finished developing Night Stand for Android and the application was published today! So if you have an Android phone and you were looking for a proper alarm clock with beautiful themes — fear no more Just open up Market app, search for [youknowwhat] and download it to your device!

Current version of NSA (Night Stand Android) is identical to version 2.1.1 of NSi (Night Stand iPhone) We will be keeping NSA one version back behind NSi, so that we can test new features on iPhone and port them over to Android version when we’re sure what and how to do. We justify this extra step simply by our lack of confidence — Android is such a new baby that hardly anybody knows how to handle it properly But we’re getting there and NSA is the proof for it.

Download, use and enjoy!

ps. If you like weird math you might have calculated that since current version of NSA is 2.1.1 and it’s supposed to be one version behind NSi…well yes! New and ultra-shiny version of Night Stand for iPhone and iPod touch is coming to your devices very soon. I will let you know about new features and fixes in the next post. Stay tuned then!

I’m proud to announce that our flagship iPhone application Night Stand was reviewed by the biggest online Mac magazine — Macworld. Rob de la Cretaz gave our baby 4 of 5 stars! Have a look at the excerpt of the review:

Something I really love about new technology is the possibility that it’s so revolutionary, it replaces things that have been commonplace in our lives for a long time. The iPhone is no exception to this, as it has found a way to take over the roles of all sorts of things we hold near and dear. Thanks to Night Stand, you can add digital alarm clock to that list.

To read more, head over to Macworld website.

I’d like to take this opportunity and address a few Rob’s concerns:

1. If the iPhone goes to sleep, the alarm won’t go off at all.

This is a potential problem, I agree. One solution is to set Auto-Lock to Never and connect your device to power supply. We are also working on a little trick, that will allow alarm to go off even if screen goes to sleep. We’re not sure if it will work, so cross your fingers!

2. Multiple, scheduled alarms.

We’ve been tinkering with this idea a lot. Our main concern is that it will duplicate iPhone Clock’s functionality, which might put us into trouble. We all know stories of apps like Opera or that podcasting utility. We want to avoid Night Stand being banned from App Store since everyone likes it so much

Again — thanks to Macworld for such a nice review and as always — big thanks to all of our users for splendid feedback and ongoing support. You rule!

In this post, I’d like to address a recurring issue with the time displayed on Night Stand’s icon. We’ve been getting many comments and support e-mails with either praise or hate. Some people ask to remove it, some accuse us of being drug addicts…boy, 4:20 certainly stirred things up!

I must admit it’s rather amusing for me to watch what’s happening. Being perfectly honest with you, 4:20 on the icon is a pure coincidence. When designing the application, I typed in digits almost randomly, paying attention to visual aspect only: I wanted them to look good and make a nice composition. That’s it. Seriously. I cross my heart, I’m not lying here.

It boils down to cultural differences. As defined by Urban Dictionary:

4:20 was the designated time for a small group of smokers at San Rafael High School in California to meet at a specific location and light up. The number originates some time around 1971. It has since been adopted by smokers the world over as the “universal time to get high.”

The thing is: this association does not exist where I live. Statement that this notion has been adopted as the “universal time to get high” is not true. I am Polish, I live in Poland and 4:20 doesn’t mean anything here. I learned about it from Night Stand comments in App Store. Now I realize that it’s popular in United States, not sure about the rest of the world though. I did ask friends from Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic and Netherlands — and none of them was familiar with 4:20. One guy from UK heard about it from an American movie. In India this number is correlated with theft and cheating. So 4:20 certainly is a symbol, but: it’s meaning is geography-dependant. I  realize this survey was amateur and incomplete to say the least, but my goal was to hint our American users that what they perceive as universal might not be in other parts of our lovely planet

So…it turns out to be an issue which doesn’t quite transfer to global culture, hence our decision is to not change it. Simple as that. We’ve been getting lots of positive feedback about it too and actually — most of our users ignore it altogether.

Summing it up, I’d like to add another 4:20 reference, this time from literature. Maybe it will shed a different, more interesting light on this matter. On the same page of Urban Dictionary, there’s a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s story “In the Walls of Eryx”:

I had encountered at least one of those curious mirage-plants about which so many of our men told stories. Anderson had warned me of them, and described their appearance very closely—the shaggy stalk, the spiky leaves, and the mottled blossoms whose gaseous dream-breeding exhalations penetrate every existing make of mask…Although everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right direction and hack my way ahead. My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-plant’s pervasive influence. Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20. Though eternities had seemed to pass, the whole experience could have consumed little more than a half-hour.

Full story is available here. Big recommendation actually: H.P. Lovecraft is a classic, you really should know his works.

ps. To clear it up: we are not pot smokers

Let’s see what’s confusing in Night Stand and I will try to provide clarifications in this post. Please write about your problems in comments and I’ll be updating this post with new answers. Let’s consider this a provisional FAQ for Night Stand

Q1. App Store application on my device wouldn’t let me update Night Stand to the newest version. I deleted it and tried downloading it again but now it tells me I have to buy it! WTF?

This is a naughty one. We are really sorry, but this is how App Store works: say if there was a freeware app and it got an update which is payware — you absolutely have to own the previous (free) version to be entitled to the update. By owning I mean: have it either on your device or in iTunes. If you don’t, I’m sorry to tell you that you are not entitled for a free update.

What can you do then?

• Reboot your device and check for updates in App Store app again. It works most of the times.
• Open up iTunes on your computer and check for updates there.
• Reset your device. Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time for at least ten seconds, until the Apple logo appears.

If these don’t work, please contact Apple for help. We really can’t do anything about your device not working properly. It’s Apple who provides means to downloading and installing applications, not us.

Q2. Why did you remove Auto-Lock feature from Night Stand? It goes to sleep after a few minutes!

A. We didn’t. Go to Night Stand settings > Sleep Timer and set it to Never. That’s it. It means that your device will never go to sleep when Night Stand is running. It’s worth noting that we recommend plugging your device to power supply when running Night Stand. Especially at night: it won’t drain the battery and you have a fully charged device first thing in the morning.

Q3. Will Night Stand damage my device’s screen?

A. This issue is called “burn-in”. To my (perhaps limited) knowledge, modern LCD displays do not suffer from it.

Q4. Will alarm go off if the screen goes to sleep?

A. No. Night Stand has to be running and be active (i.e. visible on the screen) for the alarm to play. To achieve this, set Sleep Timer to Never.

Q5. Night Stand crashes! What do I do?

A. Try rebooting your device. It’s a known issue that iPhone sometimes “swells up” when you use a few memory-consuming applications. Rebooting usually brings things back to normal.

Q6. Will Night Stand kill my battery?

A. See answer to question 2.

Q6. I have an iPod touch 1G. Why I can’t hear the alarm?

A. It’s a limitation imposed by Apple. Third party application’s can’t use the built-in speaker. Apple’s alarm clock can sound because Apple can do many things with iPhone which third party developers can’t.

We would like to take this opportunity and thank you for being so supportive and eager to check out our application and give feedback for it. We’ve had over four million downloads to date and this number is far beyond our wildest expectations.

We are continuously working to improve Night Stand. There has been some bug reports, we addressed most of them already (a maintenance update is coming) There’s also an ongoing river of feature requests and let me make this clear to everyone: we inspect every single feature request, discuss it and consider adding to our to-do list. Though, we do have a clearly set feature scope for Night Stand and we know what we would like it to become in future — it’s not like we will pack everything you’re asking for

Again — thank you so much! We will do our best and not let you down with Night Stand. Rock on!!