A sundial doesn’t tell you what time it is. It shows you where the sun is. That’s the idea behind Sundial, a widget app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac from Tangwan, a solo developer who ships apps under the name Softminilabs.
Sundial takes a stretch of time — today, this week, this month, this quarter, this year — and draws it as a row of marks. Or a circle. Or as trees. The widgets are a visual indicator of the passage of time. There’s no ticking clock, and no seconds counting down. You glance at it, and you get a sense of your time left — in the day, in life. It’s a widget that makes you contemplate mortality. Fun.
You’ve probably seen year-progress widgets before; the ones that tell you 2026 is 75% over, so you can sigh or whistle under your breath about where the hell the time goes. But Sundial takes a unique approach.
First, it can follow the lunar year, and the 24 solar terms of the traditional Chinese calendar, instead of just chopping the Gregorian year into twelve months. So Sundial knows whether today falls in Awakening of Insects or Frost’s Descent. I didn’t know those were things. Now I want to know which one I’m in. (As I write this, it’s the Autumnal Equinox term. I checked.)
There’s also a lifetime view. Enter your birthday and a life expectancy, and your life becomes a progress bar. Whether that’s profound or deeply unsettling or something in between may depend on your mood at the moment. Today, I’m at 51%. This has negatively impacted my emotional state, while also reminding me once again to seize the day. I contain multitudes.
Beyond those, you get countdowns (from a start date to a target date), count-ups (how far you’ve come since a date in the past), and an overview that puts today, this week, this month, and this year side by side. There are Home Screen widgets in every size, Lock Screen widgets, and on the Mac, a menu bar icon, so where-you-are-in-time sits right where you already glance a hundred times a day.
And there are a lot of ways to make it look how you want: 26 styles, from a single hairline bar to dot matrices, rings, bamboo, moon phases, and motifs drawn from Chinese ink painting; 57 palettes; and six typefaces. The whole thing has a consistent paper-and-ink aesthetic that feels calm and sophisticated, not cutesy.
