Features
Home & lock-screen widgets
Home & lock-screen widgets
Put the light on your home screen. Viewpoint’s widgets keep the day’s golden and blue hour, tonight’s moon and Milky Way, your next shoot, and the shooting conditions a glance away — without opening the app.
What you can add
- Sun & Light. The light where you are. A colour-coded icon shows the phase you’re in right now — blue hour, golden hour, daytime, night — and the widget counts down to the next moment (“Golden hour · Sunrise in 18 min”), rolling forward through the day (blue hour → golden hour → sunrise → daytime → … → sunset) as each phase passes. The medium size adds the sunrise and sunset times and the golden- and blue-hour windows for the day, with your location in the header.
- Tonight. The moon phase and how lit it is, moonrise and moonset, and — when the sky gets dark enough — the window when the Milky Way’s galactic core is up, with how many dark hours you’ll get.
- Conditions. A row of six round badges — golden light, clear night, aurora, fog, snow and storm light — that watch every place you have alerts on for (your current location too, when its bell is on). A badge fills amber and glows when that condition is on right now at any of them, and shows the best likelihood among them — the same numbers you see on the Conditions page. The aurora badge shows the Kp now and the Kp your place needs (“Kp 7 · needs 6”) and glows when activity reaches one of your places. With no alerts on yet, the badges show your current location and stay unlit, and the medium size reminds you to turn alerts on. A dash means there is no number for it (no golden hour in polar night, for example), which is different from 0%. The medium size names each condition and adds how many are on and how long the sky stays clear. Tap a badge to open Conditions: one place that meets it opens on that condition; several open your places with them highlighted. The small size opens the places with anything on. On Android it comes in 4×2 and 2×2.
- Plan & Locations. Your upcoming plans — the soonest highlighted, each with its place, date and time and the sun, moon or Milky Way core it is lined up for — and the saved Locations nearest you, with their distance and locality. Distances are measured from where the app last saw you; the widget never asks for your location itself. Tap it to open the plan. It comes in small, medium and large on iPhone and iPad, and 2×2, 4×2 and 4×4 on Android.
- Snap a Location. A one-tap shortcut: tap the widget to open the camera and capture a Location right where you are — your GPS, the sun, and the weather are stamped automatically. The same Snap a Location action works with Siri, the Shortcuts app, and the Action button, so you can capture by voice or a single press without finding the app first.
- AR Scout. A glance at tonight’s golden and blue hour, and a one-tap way to open the AR camera — point your phone at the sky and see where the sun, moon and Milky Way will be. (The AR camera is part of Pro.)
- Quick Tools. A medium tile of one-tap shortcuts — Snap a Location, AR Scout, Calculators, and Plans — so your most-used tools are a single tap from the home screen.
Most come in small and medium sizes (Snap a Location is a small one-tap tile). (Where a widget doesn’t have enough to fill a large tile, we leave large out rather than ship a half-empty one — the medium says it all.) There are lock-screen versions too: a moon-phase circle, a strip showing the current light phase and the next event, an inline countdown you can sit next to the clock, and Conditions — what is on at your places with alerts, as a circle, a strip or a line beside the clock.
What each widget needs
Widgets are on iPhone and iPad; on Android, the Conditions and Plan & Locations widgets are on the home screen. Every widget needs Pro; the Conditions widget needs Max.
- Pro includes every widget except Conditions: Sun & Light, Tonight (moon & Milky Way), Plan & Locations, Snap a Location, AR Scout, Quick Tools and the lock-screen widgets. The astronomy is computed on your device and your Locations and plans are your own, so these work with no connection.
- Max adds the Conditions widget, which shows live, server-scored conditions. It includes everything in Pro while you subscribe.
- Without Pro, a widget you have added shows an unlock tile reading “Unlock with Viewpoint Pro” with “Tap to see options”. Without Max, a Conditions widget shows the same tile reading “Part of Viewpoint Max”. On the lock screen the tile is a lock glyph. Tapping it opens Viewpoint on the paywall, on the Pro or the Max card.
Widgets follow the level the app holds: after you unlock Pro, start or end an Max subscription, or restore a purchase, they update within the same visit to the app. If a widget looks out of step, open Viewpoint once.
Times match where you are
Widgets use your current location and its local time, so the sun, moon, and Milky Way times are always right for where you are.
Without a connection — and how fresh it is
The sun, moon, and Milky Way widgets are pure on-device astronomy: they keep working with no connection. The Conditions widget shows the last forecast Viewpoint downloaded. Three hours after that forecast it says so (“As of 21:34”), keeps the numbers and stops glowing, since a condition it cannot check is never shown as on; after a day it clears the numbers too. Widgets refresh in the background and update the next time you open the app, so a widget is never more out of date than the last time Viewpoint ran.
In your language
Widgets are shown in the same languages as the rest of Viewpoint.