Sun Compass App Reviews

Very satisfied... Hope for updates soon. Like after youve found the sun or moons location to be able to lock it down, so when you turn your iPhone it points to wherever north is... Add this and you get a five...

Once its free, you have my download and it happened. I just downloaded the compass app and havent used it extensively yet, but it looks to be more useful than the others of its kind. I thank you and Obama for this free download and god bless both you (developer) and Obama. Obama for Prez baby!

The app will not find my location automatically. It tells me that neither the sun or moon is visible and that I should get some sleep - its 5pm... And having to place the phone perfectly flat is just annoying. I havent tested its accuracy. I got it when it was free but I would waist money on it.

Lots of unecessary bad reviews. If you take two minutes to read the directions, then go outside and test it out, you will find it is very simple to use and pretty accurate. Simply drag the sun icon to match where the sun is in the sky compared to where you are standing. Would absolutely work in a pinch if you were lost and knew which direction you needed to go. Note: Have not tried it at night. I hear it will work with the moon, but not as well.

It does one thing well. I use it almost daily and have no complaints

The best of the sun compasses in app store. Cousin to sundials, a sun compass does require a certain level of understanding: Sundials use a known compass orientation + the current location of the sun to solve for the time. Sun Compasses use a known time + the current location of the sun to solve for compass orientation. In the case of the Sun Compass app, the app supplies the time, and you indicate to the app the location of the sun, deriving in the process the proper orientation of the compass. (If you open the app several times during the day, you will see that the positions of the sun and moon are moving, very slowly, over time.) The best and safest way to use this app is to place the iPhone on a flat horizontal surface. Then hold, with one hand, a stylus so that it rises vertically from the very center of the compass rose. This will cast a shadow exactly opposite the physical suns position. Then, with the other hand, touch the sun (the one on the iPhones screen!) and rotate it until its shadow line lines up with the physical shadow you are casting. By coordinating the virtual shadow with the physical shadow, you have done the necessary work to rotate the compass into its proper alignment. You now have a compass that is displaying true (not magnetic) north. Once you have touched the sun icon, you can slide your finger back off the icon out toward the edge of the screen without losing control of the suns movement. (Make sure you don’t lose contact with the screen in the process!) That can make it easier to shift that hand around without running into the other hand holding the stylus. Sun Compass allows you to play the same trick at night, as long as the moon is out. What is lacking is a sighting point for moonless nights, something Celestial Compass offers with its display of the current location of the Big Dipper. Celestial Compass is otherwise is not as pleasant to use as Sun Compass, however. Sun Compass, in my brief comparison tests, also showed the greatest accuracy of the lot. Whether the small level of error I did observe is due to my distance from the center of my particular time zone, I don’t know. (Our modern time zone system replaced the older system where each town had it’s own time, clocked from when the sun passed directly overhead. Now, the only towns with accurate time are those that lie exactly on the center line of the time zone. If you live on either side, you are using a compromise time. This compromise can throw off a sun compass by several degrees.) 99 cents for a sanity-check backup to a GPS compass, probably a good investment. 99 cents for an afternoon with the kids, teacing them about sun compasses and sundials in a fun, engaging way, definitely a good investment.

I rate this with five stars because using the sun the app seems to work perfectly. Users who state the application doesn’t work simply haven’t followed the instructions and/or don’t understand how a sun compass works. Using the moon, however, the application seems to be off. It is daylight savings (summer) time where I live. It appears that the summer time adjustment for the moon function is in the wrong direction, resulting in a net two-hour difference. If I set the time on my iPod Touch to be two hours earlier, the moon function seems to find north correctly. I confirmed this using the free “Moon.” app from CDV Concepts, which shows the moon’s location on the points of the compass. This app therefore can also be used to find north from the position of the moon.