Golden Hour for iPhone and iPad

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Icarus


The award winning Golden Hour website is now available as a Universal app on iPhone and iPad so you can take the sun with you wherever you go.

This high quality application gives you comprehensive data on the sun for any day of the year and helps photographers around the world plan their shoots for the best possible light.

Explore the menu options above to learn more about this great app.

 

The website version of this app was picked as a cool site of the day by Kim Komando in 2009, thanks Kim!

Recent Reviews for Golden Hour

See the originals in the app store here

4th November 2010 – Robertogee in USA says “Great Little App“Perfect for what it does. Bookmark coordinates for your favorite locales or for travel destinations. Tap to quickly determine Golden Hour for where you are, and plan ahead. Excellent graphics, easy to use.
12th October 2010 – Natasha in Germany says “Great App!!!“I am a photographer that travels a lot, always looking for great light, and this works great to me…
10th October 2010 – Purple74  in Italy says “Eccellente“Davvero eccellente! Se lo slider per la selezione dei giorni fosse un po’ più preciso (è vero che comunque puoi passare al giorno precedente/successivo semplicemente toccando il lato sinistro/destro) sarebbe perfetta. Comunque già così è indispensabile.

Ciao Purple74, Grazie Mille! il mio italiano non e molto buono, ma … Note that on the golden hour tab, you can move to the previous and next days simply by tapping the screen below the horizon to the left or right
3rd September 2010 – dcndfw in the USA says “Nice …“Refreshingly straightforward app — communicates sun position info intuitively — give it a look and a tap or two and you know when to get out into the light. Don’t forget your tripod.
13th August 2010 – MadCrash in the USA says “Planning made easy“This tool really helps me plan my shoots, especially when I’m shooting in an unfamiliar location. I find I get more quality shots per outing after using this app.
12th June 2010 – Rob Bixby Photography in the USA says;A great app for any serious photographer. By being able to select any date and location, it’s possible to work out the logistics of a shoot well ahead of the event.
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New Site, New Blog

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Icarus

To complement the original Golden Hour website, we now have this extra site for users of the iPhone and iPad application.  We’ve also taken the decision to retire the old blog and so you may have noticed that the posts are now available in the archives on this site, rather than the Golden Hour site. I hope you enjoy the more contemporary look and feel for the site …

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Golden Hour for iPad now in store

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Icarus

Version 2 of Golden Hour is now in store and as a special treat for all you iPad owners out there as the application is now completely iPad compatible and has a great new interface to take advantage of all that extra screen space.

Golden Hour for iPad

Better still, this is a UNIVERSAL application so you only need to purchase it once for either your iPhone or your iPad and you will be able to install it on the other device (if you have it) for FREE.

Some apps come in HD versions that you need to pay again for, but not with Golden Hour …

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Happy Easter! Golden LITE now available and FREE

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Icarus

To celebrate Easter, I’m pleased to announce that Golden Lite is now available in the app store. This is a free version of our full Golden Hour application that allows you to try out most of the features of the application before purchase.

Feature Restrictions

1) Only data for the current day may be viewed.

2) Although the entire location database is present, you can only look at the data, not choose a town/city from the list.

3) No comprehensive data display – this is only available in the full version.

Get it free here or search the app store for Golden Lite

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Bug fix release

Posted on March 27, 2010 by Icarus

It has just been reported to us that the auto-location is sending some people half way around the world, for which huge apologies – a bug fix release is hours away.

For historic reasons some parts of the the astronomy community measure East / West the opposite way around to ground based geographers. The Golden Hour application has to deal with this in several places, but unfortunately a gremlin stole a minus sign that should have appeared in one of the equations and this led to the problem some of you are seeing. It doesn’t affect UK users (and hence we didn’t spot it) so much as many of us are too close to the meridian to see the error, however our American cousins are transplanted around the world!

The new version will be released to Apple within the next few hours (we even work at weekends to fix problems like this) and you should receive an update notification within the next few days when Apple approve the application.

** Update: Fix released by Apple 2010-03-30 @ 22:34 🙂
** Update: Bug fix release uploaded to Apple 2010-03-27 @ 13:03

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iPhone application now live!

Posted on March 20, 2010 by Icarus

I’m delighted to say that the iPhone version of the golden hour is now available in the app store worldwide.

http://itunes.com/apps/goldenhour

Over the coming weeks I’ll be upgrading the website to use some of the new features from the application including improved timezone management and a new day-night terminator display to replace the sadly now broken one from Poly9.

Enjoy the Spring Equinox!

PS. Unfortunately I’ve had to remove the 3D spinning globe by Poly9 as they seem to have discontinued support and the live day/night terminator was broken. It’s quite a big job to replace that item as it requires a rebuild in flash and papervision 3D so it may be some time before it returns here.

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iPhone app now in testing!!

Posted on March 5, 2010 by Icarus

I’m excited to announce that the Golden Hour iPhone application is now in testing and should be available in the Apple Store in early April 2010.

The application has been designed to work WITHOUT needing network access and will run on the iPod touch as well as the iPhone. There is a built in database of over 45,000 cities and the application has more detailed and indeed more accurate information than the website.

Here’s a sneak peak. If you want to know when it has been released, don’t forget to join our mailing list on the golden hour site.

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Before anyone notices, the numeric data in the screenshot is just dummy data!

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Cool site of the day!

Posted on August 29, 2009 by Icarus

Welcome all you digital goddess fans! I see the site has just been featured as Kim Komando’s cool site of the day so I’d just like to say thanks and I hope you enjoy the site.

Kim Komando Cool Site of the Day

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Golden Hour gets “Lifehackered”

Posted on August 20, 2009 by Icarus

Apologies folks.

It seems that today www.golden-hour.com has become so popular that my hosting provider has had to intervene and take the service offline. Seems odd in that it was handling more traffic when Canon kindly published it in their newsletter, but they have a hosting service to operate so I can understand their concerns.

I’m working on streamlining the script or as an alternative, migrating it to one of the other servers we have available.

It should be back very soon – check back to this page for regular updates.

UPDATE: The process of migrating the site to a server in Amazon’s computing cloud has begun. Should take a couple of hours, however as we need to make a DNS change as well, it is possible that the site may vanish for a while – but rest assured it will be back in a day or two!

20:39 BST

UPDATE: The new server is ready to rock and the script is MUCH faster thanks to some C optimisation of the XML libraries under the hood, plus some calendar cacheing that was probably what tipped the hosting company over the edge. I’m just waiting for the new DNS records to be in place before I switch name servers and begin the migration to the new system. So hold on … it will be back soon!

22:48 BST

UPDATE: The new optimised script is back on the shared server awaiting approval from the hosting company’s security team before going live. Everything could be back to normal very soon …

23:20 BST

And relax …

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New Solar Azimuth Display

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Icarus

Spurred on by the thousands of visitors this week thanks to a mention in the Canon Europe newsletter, I’ve added a feature to the golden hour calculator that I’ve been pondering for ages – namely a display of the sun angle between sunrise and sunset. Just hover over the compass icon to see a chart of how the sun moves throughout the day.

What’s especially handy about this is that because the compass is aligned with the map, you can zoom into an individual property (for example) and check where the sun will be in the sky at any time of year – so a handy tool for architects as well as photographers!

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