Living Earth HD – World Clock and Weather – Review – Three utility apps in one wonderful app

Our rating:

By: Moshen Chan

Version #: 1.32

Date Released: 2011-11-17

Developer: Moshen Chan

Price: 0.99

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Available as a universal iOS app for only $0.99, Living Earth HD is quite probably the app of its kind with the highest quality to price ratio. The developer of Living Earth HD clearly understands that the degree of excellence of a utility app—any sort of app for that matter—shouldn’t be directly proportional to its cost. If anything, what the developer has demonstrated with it is the feasibility of releasing an app and attaching a minimal price point to it with the self-assurance that a considerable number of customers will take notice since all necessary steps were apparently undertaken in ensuring that the app excels in what it says it can do.

Living Earth HD is a world time, alarm clock, and weather app all rolled into one simple package. It’s a thing of quiet beauty, really. Aside from the difference in the placement of information and the presence of icons for photo capture and slight rotation in the iPad 2, the iPhone and iPad versions have practically the same capability, but arbitrarily what will be described here is the iPhone version, which is also referred to with the “HD” designation.

Basically Living Earth HD presents a glorious 3D view of Earth, which the user can zoom in and out and rotate in virtually any direction. It shows which parts of the globe are currently experiencing daytime and which parts are under blanket of night. Near-real-time cloud formations (updated every 3 hours) are also displayed above land and sea.

Displayed at the top of the screen are the currently chosen city and current time and date in that city. Tapping this portion brings up the list of cities already added for quick reference as well as the button to add more cities to the list. The user can also go directly to the current location by tapping the corner compass icon, so long as location services have been enabled for the app.

The bottom of the screen displays the current weather conditions, including temperature highs and lows. Tapping this part displays a more detailed weather report, which accounts humidity, wind velocity, and sunrise and sunset times, as well as a five-day weather forecast for the chosen city. Finally, tapping and holding any spot on the globe screencaps everything and prompts the user to share the captured photo via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or email or just save it to the device’s photo library.

But outlined thus far are just the world time and weather functions of the app. There’s still the alarm function to be discovered. In the iPad version, an alarm icon is readily accessible in the icon tray below the globe, but in the iPhone version, the alarm function turns out to be hidden in the settings menu, which can be opened by tapping the corner gear icon in the main display. The app’s alarm supports repetition, sound or music alerts, and snooze of up to 30 minutes. As is the case with any third-party app, for the alarm to go off Living Earth HD must be running in the foreground. It’s a caveat the user won’t be averse to brook, since keeping a beautiful 3D simulation of our blue planet on display, overnight by a bedside table or for a long stretch of time on a desktop, is far from a bad idea.