The journey
Two people started iLoveClock for the fun of it — a side project that got a little out of hand. This is what happened next; scroll to wind it forward.
MachineGun and MrTopGun start iLoveClock for the fun of it — no roadmap, no plan, just a wish for a clock worth leaving on a screen. Day one ships twelve faces, sixteen background animations and a little ambient sound.
Time Lab arrives — small games that test how well you actually sense a passing second. Most of us are worse at it than we think.
Try Time LabA to-do list and a Pomodoro timer move in. The clock stops being a clock and starts being a desk.
Open the to-do listEnglish, Spanish, French and Hindi — every label, every tooltip, every error message.
A drawing spree adds twenty-five canvas-rendered designs. The nixie tubes finally got real glass, and the colour contrast finally passed.
See the galleryRepeat by weekday, three different wake-up challenges, and a full-screen ring that is genuinely hard to ignore at 6am.
Set an alarmThe stopwatch gains a classic analog face, a lap graph and session history. Pomodoro gains scroll-wheel drums you can flick.
Open the stopwatchOne button exports everything — alarms, reminders, settings, history — into a single file you own. It was never on a server anyway.
Nightstand mode, a second timezone, and a clock you can drag anywhere on any background. Per-design fonts, crisp at every zoom level.
A starfield warp, a campfire that actually flickers, lightning, snow with a snowman, falling leaves, and a cat asleep on the clock.
Reminders, to-do, alarms, stopwatch and Time Lab all adopt one look — paper, ink and rose — with a floating dock on the phone.
The whole app caches itself. Close the tab, lose the wifi, board the flight — it still keeps time.
HIIT, Tabata, EMOM, boxing rounds and AMRAP — a whole family of workout timers, each with its own bell.
Pick a workout timerSkins arrive. The to-do list becomes a corkboard of paper notes; reminders become a dry-wipe dayboard. Finished tasks go on a spike.
See the pinboardType “every Tuesday at 6” and the reminder simply understands — in English, Spanish and French. No dropdowns required.
Add a reminderThe pinboard stops being a skin and becomes the front door. Filters that actually narrow, notes that show every line they were given, and a wall clock and calendar you can keep or clear away.
See the pinboardA note is stored under its tidy name, but the sentence you typed is kept beside it — so opening one to fix a typo no longer hands you the leftovers. Older reminders were tidied the same way.
Write #money on a reminder and it becomes a filter of your own making. The list is only ever the words you actually use, so a tag you stop writing quietly disappears.
Add a reminderThe composer keeps a phrasebook. Open it from the line you were already typing and it lists what it can read — every other Tuesday, the 3rd, in two hours — with the limits stated rather than discovered.
Add a reminderA clock page can offer more than one face now, chosen by what the page is for: the analog page offers the analog faces, the night page the ones you can read in the dark. Colours are their own row, so picking a look no longer means picking blind.
See the galleryOn a 27-inch screen the app used to draw a phone in the middle of it. The pinboard, the dayboard, all twenty-four clock faces, the card grids and every utility page from Alarms to the Timer now grow with the glass they are on — and the about copy waits below the fold instead of surfacing halfway up it.
The timer had four looks and wore none of them until you committed. The setup screen wears the one you chose, Style moved to the header where the rest of the app keeps it, and the old table of session rows became a ring, a week, and eight weeks of days.
Open the Pomodoro timerStill the same two people, still tinkering. Every new thing we build earns another line here.
Back to clockEverything the story mentions, one tap away.