Vela Design Group releases VelaClock 1.5.1 for Mac OS X "Tiger"

Berkeley, California - March 17, 2006 - Vela Design Group announces VelaClock 1.5.1, a Dashboard widget. This is a free update for current VelaClock customers.

VelaClock is a world clock widget with a highly configurable user interface. Besides displaying local times, users can quickly display the time of sunrise, sunset, or twilight, duration of daylight, current phase of moon, time zone information and much more. The interface can easily be configured to use a minimum amount of screen space or if the user wishes, multiple lower panes can be opened to display more information and take up more screen space.

The top pane of VelaClock displays a list of cities and corresponding local times. For more detailed information about the currently selected city, the user can choose whether to display up to four additional panes (each pane has a full and a minimized version):

  1. A light level bar that gives the user a picture of the 24 hours of natural light (bright daylight, three kinds of twilight and night) for the current day. A thin white bar indicates when the moon is visible. The duration of daylight is specified in hours and minutes.
  2. Specific times for sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset. Begin/end times for civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight can also be displayed.
  3. An image of the moon as seen in the sky above the currently selected city. This image accurately depicts the angle of the moon's crescent. Because this angle can change dramatically within the span of an hour, it is updated once a minute, as is the moon's phase. This view also contains the name of the current phase, as well as local times for the next and previous phase events (new, quarter, full).
  4. An analog clock and time zone information. The relative time shows the number of hours the selected city is ahead or behind the current time zone, as set in System Preferences.

New for VelaClock 1.5.1:
- Significantly improved user interface to give the user more control over the amount of information to be displayed. Each information pane now has a full or minimized view or can be hidden.
- Added a new pane that displays sun and moon rise/set times for the selected city.
- Optimized for Intel-based Macs.
- Corrected issue with registration verification.

In the February 2006 issue of Macworld, VelaClock 1.4 was reviewed in Dan Frakes' Mac Gems column and received a four-mice rating. VelaClock frequently appears in Apple's Top 50 widgets page. VelaClock 1.0 was released on the same day that Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" was released, April 29, 2005. Since that day, VelaClock has progressively improved with five significant updates.

VelaClock is a unique widget in that it is completely self-contained. Many widgets are light weight front-ends to web services; such widgets require an internet connection. By contrast, VelaClock is designed to function without an internet connection, and so is particularly useful for laptop users away from their home or office. Astronomical calculations are performed by an internal code module.

VelaClock was designed specifically for Tiger users and was built using the Apple Xcode toolset. VelaClock requires Mac OS X "Tiger" version 10.4 or newer.

VelaClock is priced at $5.95 and is available now directly from the Vela Design Group website, at http://www.veladg.com.