Another Clock

Most digital clocks change a digit by simply swapping it. Another Clock takes it apart.

Every minute, a character walks in from the side of the screen, demolishes the digits that changed, and rebuilds them bar by bar. Then they leave. A minute later, someone does it again from the other side. On the hour, they rebuild every digit.

THE CAST

Five characters, each with their own body, their own walk, and their own opinion about how a digit should come apart.

Brick lays bricks. He knocks the old digit down, then sets the new bars one at a time, and dusts off his hands when he is done. He comes with the app.

Rustbucket rolls in on treads and works in silence. The old bars retract into themselves and blink out; the new ones are snapped into place by a telescoping boom. He is the fast one.

Mochi is a cat. She rears up and bats the old bars off the edge of the screen, one by one, and then washes a paw while the display quietly repairs itself. She is the only one who destroys without building.

Grimwald never touches anything. Bars vanish in a shower of sparks that drift upwards, and the new ones simply materialise inside an expanding ring.

Bo is weightless and in no hurry at all. Bars drift away almost without gravity, and each new one is pushed until it coasts into its slot.

DRESSING UP

Around Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day and Easter, whoever you have chosen dresses up: a ghostly sheet, a Santa hat, a string of lights, a few hearts, bunny ears. Grimwald, who already had the hat and the beard, only needs a red robe. At Easter, every bar that comes down cracks like an eggshell. You can switch it off.

Nothing here is a picture. Every character is a skeleton animated from code, and every digit is real seven-segment geometry, so the whole thing stays perfectly sharp on any screen and adds almost nothing to the download.

BUILT TO SIT ON A DESK ALL NIGHT

It can be your screensaver, coming on by itself whenever the phone is docked or charging. There is also a home-screen widget that shows the time.

The screen follows the light in the room. In daylight it is bright and clear; as the room darkens it dims and slides to a deep amber with no blue in it, so a clock on a bedside table at three in the morning does not wreck your night vision. It responds instantly when you turn a lamp on, and slowly when a shadow passes, so it never flashes at you.

You choose the colour. Eight presets, or set the hue and depth yourself. If you would rather keep your green clock green all night, there is a switch for that. The digits come in four styles: Classic, Block, Round and Slim.

The whole picture drifts by a couple of pixels over the course of hours — far too slowly to see, but enough that an OLED panel never keeps the same pixels lit.

The animation only runs while a minute is actually changing. The rest of the time the clock is doing almost nothing at all.

FREE AND PAID

Brick and every feature above are free, with no ads and no subscription.

The other four characters are one-off purchases, and there is a bundle if you want all of them. You can preview any of them in full before deciding — Try runs a complete minute change with that character.

There is also a tip jar, if you feel like buying the developer a coffee. It unlocks nothing.

NO TRACKING

No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no server. The app collects nothing about you and sends nothing anywhere. Your settings stay on your device.

Landscape or portrait, on phones and tablets. Android 8.0 and up.