BoxClock – Review
By App Type: Uncategorized
Our rating: 
By: David Wicks
Version #: 1.0 (iPhone OS 3.0 Tested)
Date Released: 2009-08-01
Developer: BoxClock
Price: 0.99
User Rating:
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I’m a sucker for stuff that deal with time, or rather, the amazing ways by which it is manipulated and by which its tremendous power is utilized for whatever reason. This is in part why a number of my favorite things happen to each have time at its core. My favorite movie? Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, with its time-turning deus ex machina. My favorite television show? Lost, with its time-traveling penultimate season. My favorite book? The Hours, with its time-skipping storyline. My favorite song? Time After Time, obviously. Kidding.
I love playing with time. That’s the bottomline. And I particularly love playing with time on this little iPhone app called BoxClock. And a long, fairly time-consuming one at that.
BoxClock was programmed by developer David Wicks originally as a Web toy. Taking advantage of the iPhone platform’s multitouch and accelerometer features, he later succeeded in porting the Web app into a working iPhone app, available in the iTunes App Store for just under a dollar.
BoxClock is so named for the obvious reason that it displays boxes and for the not-so-obvious reason that it is, in fact, a clock. To read the time on this peculiar timepiece, you must correctly count the shaded bars in the background and the boxes currently displayed. The number of bars is the present hour while the number of boxes is equal to the minutes past the hour. Try the screenshot here. You should get 8:24.
However, I doubt you’ll turn to this thing to confirm if you’re indeed running late for an important date or if it’s almost time to watch another episode of FlashForward. I myself don’t find it particularly useful as a clock. But as an iPhone app per se, I find it to be quite well done.
The color scheme of the boxes and the background can be set on the app’s settings page. There you can adjust a set of sliders to come up with your color preferences. You can go plain black and white or you can just go crazy. The boxes can also be swiped and flicked around the screen. This is where the iPhone’s touch and tilt capabilities really come into play, and the resulting movements show just how meticulous the consideration of physics that went into the development of BoxClock was.
No, with all due respect to the developer, BoxClock is far from being my favorite iPhone app. It is, however, my perennial favorite weapon in killing time, in dilly-dallying with its time-telling gradient bars and gravitating boxes.
Quick Take
Value:Very Low
Would I Buy Again:No
Learning Curve:Low
Who Is It For:Anyone who has a dollar to spare and curious to know how a clock can be executed with a group of boxes and some color schemes.
What I Like:Its near-perfect consideration of physics.
What I Don't Like:Nothing much can be done with it.
Final Statement:This app is not very useful as a clock, and it is aware of that. It is, however, a good demonstration of the iPhone platform's touch and tilt capabilities in managing time display.
