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Article in App of the Week category.
Alpenglow Ensures You Never Miss The Magic Moment
My wife and I are big into traveling and as part of that, we love to take in the sunrise and sunset. Going so far…
My wife and I are big into traveling and as part of that, we love to take in the sunrise and sunset. Going so far as to plan where we’ll be for this golden hour light. Sometimes we want to get in a photoshoot and other times we just want to bask in the glow. The problem we quickly realized though, is when you travel, you never quite know when the sun is going to cross that horizon. That’s why I started using apps such as Alpenglow to keep me in the loop.
Alpenglow truly is a well-designed app with every pixel in place. The UI isn’t über complicated though, which is a good thing. It keeps things simple and uses many stock UI elements to create lists, toggles, and calendar views. Doing so helps maintain that native experience but is heightened with good color choices and custom iconography.
For trips, there’s a fantastic “plan ahead” mode that uses this split view I particularly like. The bottom half of display has your standard calendar view, which is designed to appear as if its hovering above a light grey background. Above it sits a swipeable box that gives you the sunrise and sunset times, how far away they are, and how pretty they will be based on weather conditions. It also has a grid view where you can see the four days and mini graphs will give you the rating of each event. I love using this to plan when we should schedule stuff revolving around the sun.
There’s plenty of other nice-to-have benefits here. While it is natively a bright, vivid app it supports the system-level dark mode so if you prefer that aesthetic it will have you covered. It can alert you with customized reminders and notifications based on what you want to see and the forecast. And recently it was updated with new Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets.
I think this app is fairly niche. Not everyone needs to track the sunrise and sunset but I think it is amazingly cool and this has helped me see some amazing sights. We’ve seen the sun set through a waterfall in Iceland, the sun disappear across the coral in the Keys, and the sun rise while we sat on a bench in the Central Park Mall. The information here isn’t unique, but it’s presented in a wholly useful and elegant way.
But enough about other people's apps.
