Hey everyone!

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!

Hello everyone!

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!

Hello everyone!

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!

Hello everyone!

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

Dear Night Stand users!

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!!