"Count down to 9 a.m. on the 3rd." It sounds like the simplest feature in the world. It took weeks.
The next update of Last. adds Until: countdowns to trips, birthdays and big days. Most countdown apps stop at the date. Until also lets you set an exact time. And the moment you add a time, you inherit every strange thing clocks do.
Which 9 a.m.?
Say your flight leaves Lisbon at 9:00 on 10 October. You set the countdown at home in New York. Then you land in Lisbon, your phone switches time zone, and a naive countdown quietly shifts by five hours, because it stored "9:00" in whatever zone the phone happened to be in.
Until doesn't do that. A timed countdown keeps the time zone you picked. The flight is 9:00 Lisbon time, wherever you are when you look at it. You can choose from every time zone your iPhone knows: all 443 of them.
Times that don't exist
Twice a year, daylight saving time does something rude. In spring, clocks jump forward an hour, so 2:30 a.m. simply never happens that night. In autumn they fall back, so 1:30 a.m. happens twice.
Most software handles this by silently picking something and hoping you don't notice. Last. asks instead:
- If the time you chose doesn't exist, you get an inline correction and choose what you meant.
- If it happens twice, you pick which one, with the UTC offsets shown.
Nothing is silently moved. It's a small thing that almost nobody will ever run into, which is exactly why it has to be right.
"Arrived" isn't "happened"
Here's the other thing I didn't want to fake. When a countdown reaches its date, most apps celebrate: confetti, done. But reaching the date doesn't mean the trip happened. Flights get cancelled. Birthdays get moved.
So Until never marks itself as arrived. When the day comes, Last. asks whether it actually happened, and only then keeps a print for it, with the real date. If it moved, you move it. Software shouldn't pretend.
All-day is still the default
Most countdowns don't need a time at all, and Until doesn't make you add one. Pick a date and you're done. The time zone work only kicks in when you ask for precision.
Until arrives in Last. on 3 October, alongside days-without runs, with widgets, Apple Watch and Live Activities that understand all three ways to count.
