Night Stand: past, present, future.
Press materials for the SDK announcement.
In 2007, the first iPhone was introduced sans support for 3rd party apps, which was quite a shock for us being – *ahem* – the 3rd party. But in March 2008 Apple pulled a complete 180, releasing the first SDK for iPhone with a super dev-friendly feature set that changed the playing field overnight. To find our sea legs with the shiny new iPhone developer tools, we decided right then on our first internal iPhone project: a kick-ass clock with stylish graphical design and razor sharp user experience, called Night Stand.
The, erm... 'iconic' Night Stand icon.
The de facto iPhone standard for not only what a clock looks like, but how one functions, too.
Once unleashed, the dev team for Night Stand moved like a pack of badgers on home brew amphetamine. Years of experience in user interface design and programming for OS X paid off bigtime with the transition to iPhone, and before the year was out Sourcebits had birthed its new iPhone-centric division: Spoonjuice, with its first app, Night Stand, cruising to number one in the Utilities category. We had no idea at the time, but Night Stand would soon be downloaded over 3M times, receive heaps of critical acclaim in the press, and set the de facto standard for not only what a clock utility looks like on iPhone, but also how one functions.
The now-mandatory LCD clockface, a Night Stand original.
Pruning the interface like a bonsai tree.
Just how awesome is Night Stand? If imitation is any indication, well, pretty frikkin awesome. Starting with a bold, signature app icon and one gorgeously crafted timeface for v1.0, Night Stand set the motifs that continue to dominate even now among the over 200 clocks available today on the App Store. Yup, you read that right: over 200.
But you don’t become Number 1 by luck. You innovate. And to do that you gather people with creativity and vision to drive the design. For Night Stand, we put in place what soon became the Spoonjuice permanent core: a freakish assemblage of award-winning user interface geeks, icon alchemists, and over-caffeinated code zombies. And with each wireframe came new iterations of the design, endless economizing of taps and swipes, pruning the interface like a bonsai tree down to its barest essence.
Metanoia
Classic LCD
Geek-friendly Binary, with beautiful, subtle animations.
Fierce self control.
From the beginning, Night Stand’s strong suit has been its simplicity: an extraordinarily beautiful clock, purposefully and lovingly designed, sans distraction. Over time, with the introduction of several new clockfaces and increasingly rich feature set, it would have been easy to compromise on the interface. But even now, approaching the landmark third version, nothing has changed on the surface. You have to admire such fierce self control. Especially considering what our competition has been regurgitating:
no comment.... ~_~
HD for everyone.
At the end of the day, despite the relentless stream of imitations, hyper-saturation of clock utilities in the App Store and swarm of crippled freebies from our rivals, Night Stand consistently reaches the Top 50 in the biggest markets while grabbing the #1 spot in at least 5 other stores internationally. Daily. And in our view, this is just the beginning. With the next update for iPhone bringing in the high-end features of the best-selling HD version for iPad, everyone best buckle up. We’re on track for another lightspeed jump ahead of the riffraff.
Beautiful, minimal Milk.
The new Night Stand world clock: peerless design and animation.
A new, unreleased theme... you'll have to see it to believe it. @_@
