Sunday, August 08, 2010

Night Stand clock app

The Night Stand clock app, orginally made for iPhone, has a lovely version for iPad. It has several interfaces to choose from which I like, and I finally got the big clear clock I wanted in my living room.      :-)
The different faces are just beautiful. Amazing design.
It's an alarm clock too, although this seems to be less polished than the visual interface.


Also, in my occasional efforts to "exercise" the 'pad's battery by running it flat so it does not die, the iPad has been running the clock, screen on, unplugged, for 12 hours now, and there's still 30% battery left! (Of course this does not tax the processor much, and that's an influence. Still.)
Update: it ran for over sixteen hours all told!

4 comments:

Bruce said...

I don't think what you are doing here is a good idea. For older NiCd batteries it would be OK, but not for Lithium based batteries. This is what I know:

1) There are only so many "charge cycles" in the battery. The more you use it, the fewer charge cycles you will have left to use. So running down the battery just to run it down is wasting the capacity of the battery.

2) Running a Lithium based battery all the way down can damage it. It can greatly reduce the capacity and the lifetime of the battery.

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thank you very much.

I had not realized there was a big difference there.

Bruce said...

You are welcome Eolake. Mostly I just use my iPad, phone, cameras, etc. I charge when it's convenient, which is often when they still have 50 percent or more charge.

Once in a while I will run the Android phone down below 50 percent, turn it off, and pull out the battery. That seems to help keep the percent available reading accurate.

Apple publishes a technique for calibrating the percent available settings on a laptop. This does involve running the battery down.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.6/en/9036.html

This seems wasteful to me though. I don't know anybody who does this regularly.

Pascal [P-04referent] said...

Basic rule: when "exercising" your battery is something recommended, nowadays expect the user's manual to say so. :-)

Thanks for the serious link, Bruce. Very useful.