By Jason Snell

May 31, 2019 9:22 AM PT

Applications Folder: CalZones

I work with people who live nowhere near me.

Put together all my collaborators on various projects who live in the Bay Area and you’d barely be able to fill a small conference room. (There are four, by my count, including Roman, my editor at Macworld.)

Everyone else I work with is somewhere else in the world. And with a few exceptions, most of them do not work in the Pacific time zone. Which means that I do a lot of interpreting of different time zones when setting up meetings or calls or podcast sessions. There are the four major U.S. time zones, sure, but I’ve also got international collaborators, who add even more complication to the mix.

Fortunately, these days my web scheduler of choice, Doodle, does the right thing and supports time zones. But there’s also a new calendar app for iOS that has been built for people in situations like mine. If you work with people in lots of different time zones, consider David Smith’s $5 CalZones.

CalZones was built with international collaboration in mind—London-based Myke Hurley, who co-hosts many podcasts with people who don’t live in London, was an inspiration—and it’s got a clever squares-based interface that can indicate via color coding whether it’s business time, the evening, or the middle of the night in various locales. You can customize the time zones you’d like to see, and schedule events with all the different zones visible at once. And of course, it ties in with your existing calendar database.

All it takes is averting one meeting fail for CalZones to be worth it. I love the idea of the app and how it’s specifically focused. Most people won’t need it, but if you do, you should find it quite helpful.