For many people, daylight saving time (DST) is a nuisance. The clocks change, sleep is disrupted, and everyone ends up groggy and grumpy – so much so that there are growing movements to abolish DST entirely in both the US and EU.
But for me, DST is a gift. And that comes down to two things. First, I live far north of the equator. Secondly, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).
Solstice for iPhone.
The further you are from the equator, the more extreme daylight shifts throughout the year. Here in the south of the UK, the sun doesn’t rise until after 8am in midwinter, and yet it’s dark again by around 4pm. Compare that to Los Angeles, which, even in its darkest days, gets almost an extra hour of daylight at each end of the day. The upside for those of us further north is long summer evenings – sunsets well after 9pm. Even if, here in England, that doesn’t necessarily mean more actual sun.
Because I’m apparently solar-powered, I love those summer months – but the winters are tough. As soon as the clocks change and DST is gone in October, it hits me. Evenings snap to darkness. A creeping malaise sets in. Everything feels more difficult. And even after the winter solstice, when the days slowly start stretching out again, the change is initially so tiny that it barely registers.
Enter Solstice – a simple, elegant iPhone app that helps me stay sane throughout the winter.
This app does one thing and does it well – it tracks daylight. You can monitor multiple locations and peruse total and remaining daylight for the current day, sunrise and sunset times, and monthly averages. Best of all, there’s a visual graph that shows exactly how much more daylight you’re getting than yesterday. It’s a reality check – a gentle, reaffirming nudge that brighter days really are coming.
Solstice options.
This can also take the form of a daily notification. Solstice will ping you at a user-defined time every day with details of sunrise and sunset times, total daylight hours, and any daylight gain/loss. But the real magic is a small, thoughtful feature I’ve not seen elsewhere: a ‘SAD preference’ setting. It allows you to hide daylight loss readings from the notification – or silence alerts entirely during the downhill stretch. It’s a tiny tweak, but one that makes a huge difference to those of us whose mood and wellbeing are tightly bound to daylight. It’s the hallmark of an app built with real empathy, going beyond merely providing data by fully considering how that data is provided and who it’s being provided to.
Solstice is free on the App Store, with optional tips to support the developer.