Analog Clock Tile app is finally useful! A new, huge update brought a lot of new features, but the most important one is time zones support! Yes, that means that you can pin a tile to show time in different time zone. Travelers, international workers, folks in long-distance relationship and clock lovers – that’s for you! Just take a look at your start screen and you’ll know what time is it in another part of the globe!

That basically means that you’ll have multiple clock tiles on your start screen (new feature!). In order to know what clock tells what time, you can use different clock faces. Or different background colors (new feature!). Or even put a title on a tile (new feature!).

But that’s not all – there are a lot of improvements under the hood. The most important are memory and bandwidth optimizations for low-spec phones. That means that downloads are faster and even less resources are used.

Previous version of this app had that infamous “Donate” button. That doesn’t work. Of course, there are a few nice people that appreciate other people’s work and do donate, but the total amount received is a joke (less than 50US$ during six months). So I’m moving to a new monetization model – selling premium feature. You can pin as many tiles you like, you can change backgrounds and tile titles – but if you want that time zone support (ha!)… please support my work, or at least a cup of tea I’m drinking right now. I don’t expect to get rich from this, but the start is good – I’ve quadrupled the revenue in just five days! Ok, the app was featured on US market and on WindowsCentral.com in that period, so don’t think I’ll be earning 200$ per week. Not even close. But that model obviously works much better than donations. (Of course, all donators will get time zones support for free – just contact me!)

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I have to admit – there is a huge bug in the app. It’s not mine, it’s inside the Windows Phone OS and it forces me not to update my app at all. (Luckily, I can add new clock faces without updating the app itself.) The problem is – if the app is updated (to be more precise – if the version number changes), I cannot update tiles made with previous version. At least not every minute, and that’s the very core of a clock on a tile. Old tiles have to be repinned by an user manually. And that sucks.

For developers that need more details – it fails on TileUpdateManager.CreateTileUpdaterForSecondaryTile(tileId); method, throwing “The application identifier provided is invalid” exception. There is no workaround that I know of, and Microsoft promised to fix that in the next major OS version (that’s why I can’t wait Windows 10). That’s why I’ve beta tested this version for three months. On the other hand, if the update occurs, the process of tile repinning I’ve implemented is quite simple, although still partly manual and annoying. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll be able to wait for Windows 10 without an update.
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The app is great (average rating is 4.32), and it makes your start screen beautiful. Download it now!

And, by the way – there are three new eggs and bunnies related clock faces inside the app. Take a look!