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.
The kind of detail that makes me love indie apps: Tangwan put real work into the Chinese serif typeface Sundial uses, trimming the font from about 11.6 MB down to 3 MB per weight, and adding tabular figures so that the percentages in your widgets don’t jiggle around as the numbers change. You’d never notice. Tangwan did. You’re welcome.
Your data stays on your device and can sync via iCloud; the App Store privacy label says the developer collects nothing.
Sundial is free for up to three widgets with the basic styles and palettes. Sundial Pro removes the limit and unlocks every style, every palette, and iCloud sync, for $0.99 a month, $6.99 a year, or $9.99 once for a lifetime license. That last one’s the easy call. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
More from Softminilabs
Sundial is the newest of 15 apps in the Softminilabs catalog, all built around the same idea: small apps that do one thing well, in both English and Chinese. A handful of highlights:
Days Since is a gentle reminder app for birthdays and anniversaries, with a small ink-drawn card for each person. It has the lunar calendar built in, which matters a great deal if you have a grandmother whose birthday is the 15th of the 8th moon.
DareAlarm rings through Silent Mode and Focus settings, and won’t stop ringing until you beat a wake-up game. Oversleep, and it sends a failure report to people you preselected. I wish I slept soundly enough to need this app. I… do not.
AHHH! buries a little paper buddy under stress words (“overtime,” “exams,” “your ex”), and you yell at your phone to blast them away. The louder you yell, the bigger the blast. I have not tried this at home. My family is grateful.
Lull offers 62 ambient sounds for sleep and focus that you can layer in a mixer. Rain on a roof plus coffee-shop hum plus lo-fi piano. Are you sleepy yet?
Tangwan makes a slew of apps, and they have personality and even whimsy without lacking maturity.
Check out Sundial, and the rest of the Softminilabs apps.