Now that Summer is coming to an end, the holidays are approaching fast; that means it’s about time we start looking forward to our favorite meal, the beginning of our vacation, or that magical morning in December.
That’s why we’ve compiled the fifteen best iPhone apps for counting down the days to our favorite events.
Big Day
If you’re looking for a classy app to let you just count the days to a special occasion, look no further than Big Day. With an absolutely delicious user interface, Big Day is sure to please. As an interesting addition, you can even save a picture of your countdown and share. It with friends!
Big Day a real gem for a low price, and we at AppStorm appreciate its refined, not overwrought visual design.
Price: $0.99
Developer: whatisid
Big Day
Epoch
When you buy Epoch for $0.99, you aren’t buying the myriad features found in competing apps; you are buying pure user interface bliss.
With beautiful, painstakingly designed graphics and icons, the dark and rich interface of Epoch is sure to bring you closer every day to that Italian vacation you’ve been looking forward to. An awesome little feature that we appreciate very much is the ability to pin your event to a location on a map.
Price: $0.99
Developer: Gabe Shahbazian
Epoch
Until Countdown
Until Countdown is a versatile timer that can count the months, weeks and days to an event far into the future, or simply help you time your laundry. Just tap the plus button in the upper right-hand corner to get started, and you’ll be counting the days in no time!
Until Countdown stands out with rich graphics and playful controls, and an icon you’ll be proud to keep on your first home screen. As an added bonus, it’s a Universal app, with a special version for iPad included. At only $0.99, Until Countdown is a bargain!
Price: $0.99
Developer: Lukas Burgstaller
Until Countdown
Timenotes
Timenotes seems to be the countdown app for the designer/scrapbooker in each of us. What Timenotes brings to the table that other similar apps lack is an adorable selection of themes and colors that you get to choose from when you are setting up a countdown (for instance, “Wedding” or “Boy”).
We love the impeccable typography, beautiful landscape views, and impressive graphics; even more important to many users is that Timenotes features push notifications. For $0.99, Timenotes is a great buy, but beware: you’ll probably find yourself setting countdowns for everything, just to get another chance to ogle that gorgeous user interface.
Price: $0.99
Developer: Manufactura Software, LLC
Timenotes
Soon
Soon, at $1.99, is a little more expensive than its competitors, but it doesn’t disappoint. With Soon, you can not only track hoe many days are left until some event, but also how many have elapsed since (for instance, how long you have stayed on your new diet, or have been working on a certain project).
With a simple, yet lick-able user interface, as well as the added benefit of push notifications, Soon is sure to deliver.
Price: $1.99
Developer: Nick Takayama
Soon
Days To Go
Days To Go is of a different breed from its competitors: where most try to be as shiny as possible, Days To Go charms us with it’s elegant minimalism, both in visual design and feature-set.
With Days To Go, it’s dead simple to setup a countdown: just tap the plus button, enter a title and a date, and you are done! Add as many countdowns as you wish, and you can see them all on the main view of the application. Even better, Days To Go also works on your iPad at full resolution!
We love it when app developers take cues from Apple in visual design, and are pleased to see that the author of Days To Go took inspiration from Apple’s built-in Clock app in designing the gradients and shadows for the main countdowns list. At only $0.99, Days To Go is definitely worth a try.
Price: $0.99
Developer: DJM Development
Days To Go
Day Tracker
Day Tracker puts a different spin on the problem of managing event countdowns, letting you see all your countdowns in a beautiful grid on the first screen. When you choose to view one of your countdowns, the time left is displayed in a refined faux-LED digital clock at the top of the screen. Or course, you can add as many events to Day Tracker as you wish. As an added benefit, each event gets its own icon (for instance, a gift box, an airplane, or a television set), which makes it a snap to differentiate between your events at a glance.
From the custom (and yet classy) navigation bars, to the intuitive editing interface, it is clear that the author of Day Tracker put a lot of work into making this app as beautiful and nice to use as possible, and it sure paid off. For just $0.99, snag Day Tracker and start counting the days to your next special event!
Price: $0.99
Developer: Hurryforward Ltd
Day Tracker
Mint Countdowns 2
Mint Countdowns 2, a free app, is a lot more advanced and fully-featured than most of its competitors. Like other apps, you can set timers to multiple special days, but Mint Countdowns 2 lets you organize many different timers into sets, which you can share online!
Even better, Mint Countdowns 2 will send you push notifications for your events. At free (ad-supported), the excellent features, beautiful icon and careful user interface design of Mint Countdowns are hard to beat. The only thing caveat is that some users have reported freezing after adding of events; we hope that Mint Apps resolves this soon.
Price: FREE
Developer: Mint Apps
Mint Countdowns 2
Countdown Calendar
The developer of the popular Countdown Calendar Dashboard widget for Mac OS is back with Countdown Calendar for iPhone, featuring a slick and intuitive user interface with rich graphics, and a beautiful dark color scheme. One of our favorite features is that when you tap on the calendar icon to the left of each countdown, it will toggle between days, weeks, months and years.
But even better is its central countdown repository, where you can download other users’ countdowns and upload your own! This is some serious added value for a really simple, carefully-crafted application.
Price: $1.99
Developer: The Future of Pinball, LLC
Countdown
Date Countdown
With Date Countdown, you don’t get to add and categorize several countdowns: this app is for when you want to focus only one one big event in the future, and count the years, months, days, minutes and seconds until it arrives.
Date Countdown displays your countdown on top of any picture from your photo library or camera roll, and offers the unique feature of setting the brightness of this background image. With positive reviews in the App Store, the radical simplicity of this inexpensive app makes it a worthy contender.
Price: $0.99
Developer: GEEx Systems
Date Countdown
Days Until
Days Until lets you keep track of multiple events, but as an added benefit will continue to keep track of them after they pass. A neat little feature of Days Until is that the home screen icon can be adorned with a badge which can either show the number of events due in the next ten days, or the number of days to the nearest upcoming event.
Countdowns can then be displayed on top of images from your photo library or camera roll. Not only can you change the background image; you also control the font and color of the text. Days Until is a free application (with ads, that can be removed with an In App Purchase of $0.99), but if we had one complaint, it would be that the app does not do as good a job at staying within Apple’s interface guidelines. This app could be improved by replacing some of the custom controls with plain or styled standard ones.
Price: FREE
Developer: Richard Shearman
Days Until
Countdown
Countdown is a fully-featured countdown manager with a few tricks up its sleeve. First, it can handle repeating events, which is helpful for holidays and birthdays; more importantly, Countdown supports iOS 4′s brand new Local Notifications technology (which lets an app schedule notifications to occur while the app is not open, but without using Push Notifications). Also of note, with a separate In App Purchase of $2.99, you can synchronize your data between multiple iOS devices over Wi-Fi.
Countdown does a nice job of sticking to the basics in terms of visual design; simple is good.
Price: $0.99
Developer: IAM Web Services
Countdown
FlipDown
FlipDown is another graphical countdown app, which lets you see multiple countdowns on the opening screen, set on top of a background of your choice. What differentiates FlipDown is that each countdown is in the form of a stylized digital clock, and you can choose from several different styles.
While we would have preferred a little less overstated graphics in the main visual design of the app, we really appreciate the sexy and powerful date picker; one of my gripes with Apple’s built-in date picker is that sometimes it is hard to tell whether I am editing the day, or the month. FlipDown includes a really well-conceived augmentation of Apple’s design, complete with subtle labels.
FlipDown costs a little more than most other contenders, but it’s well worth a try!
Price: $1.99
Developer: InterHive
FlipDown
TymeLynz
TymeLynz is a simple app to count the days until (or since) any event, such as your anniversary, your child’s birth, or even that vacation you’re looking forward to. We very much appreciate the super-simple, understated user interface, and think will too.
TymeLynz costs $1.99, but is graced by overwhelmingly positive reviews; if you are ready to put down two dollars, it is definitely worth of a shot for your home screen!
Price: $1.99
Developer: White Wolf Software
TymeLynz
Ticker
We use to-do lists to track what’s now, calendars to track what’s around the corner; but what about things far into the future? Meet Ticker.
Ticker features many icons that you can decorate your countdowns with, and is in general pretty nice and full-featured. If we could make a suggestion for improvement, it would be to work on the editor table views and make them feel a little bit more idiomatic (text field bezels, label colors, etc.). Ticker feels like a pretty solid app, but we feel that $4.99 is a little bit much, considering the relative quality of its less expensive competitors. But nonetheless, if you’ve got the cash, give Ticker a try and let us know what you think!
Price: $4.99
Developer: IncisiveGeek
Ticker
What do you think?
These are some of the best iPhone apps for counting the days on the App Store, and we hope that you get a chance to try a few! There’s nothing like a new favorite iPhone app to get the holidays started.
Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of our selection, and if you have a favorite that we missed!