I’ve been working on an app for myself I’m currently calling AstroWatch, designed to quickly show me sunrise/sunset, moon phase, moonrise/moonset time and direction, and astronomical/nautical dawn & dusk. As someone often stargazing and taking landscape & night-sky photos, this is a quick way to glance at the Kompakt and see info I need to plan out when and where I want to photograph / stargaze. I also work at a dark sky location, so I can quickly check this when providing stargazing info to visitors.
The interface is very simple - rather than detecting your location, you manually input a location, and see a simple text list with no scrolling needed. You can use arrows at the top of the screen to check info for upcoming days.
I’m considering adding a separate tab with additional info, like quickly looking at the next new moon and full moon, or maybe some quick info about Milky Way viewing conditions.
Would this type of app be of interest to anyone? If so, I can work on getting it shared on GitHub as I make updates. Feel free to send any thoughts my way!
I’ve attached some images of how I currently have it designed.
I’m interested too. When I’m riding my pony outside, I like to know when the sun sets, so I can return in time to the stable. This app is exactly what I need.
@wander & @kiss_less I am glad to hear you are interested! I’ll update this thread in the coming weeks once I get everything updated and on GitHub. And @smuch thank you so much for sharing the design challenge! I may enter
On the GitHub page, you’ll see the APK to download under Releases.
The goal with this app is to provide useful information about the sun, moon, and night sky to stargazers, astronomers, photographers, outdoor enthusiasts, and anyone who likes keeping up with what’s going on in the sky. Users can view today’s information for any location, and access a monthly calendar to plan ahead.
The ReadMe section on GitHub goes into full details, but here are the app’s main features and some screenshots:
Thank you, exactly what I was looking for. I found one little purely aesthetic thing, the buttons “today” and “done” in the calendar don’t have the same hight.
While doing some additional testing, I identified a potential startup stability issue that may occur under certain circumstances related to saved location data.
I have a small maintenance update in the works and am currently testing it before publishing. I have not received reports of this issue from others, but I wanted to let you all know in the interest of transparency.
If you’ve encountered any crashes or unexpected behavior, please let me know what happened and what location was selected at the time.
I’ll have v1.0.1 with the stability fix published by the end of the week. Thanks again for the encouragement!
Just downloaded this and I love it! Thank you for adding to the collection of excellent Kompakt apps that do something useful, and just something useful, with no strings attached.
