Vision Pro App Spotlight: Day Ahead

Day Ahead is an interesting approach to visualizing the events on your calendar. It’s a visionOS-only app that uses what looks like a transparent tube filled with drops of colored liquid that represent the events of your day. It’s strange, but I think there’s something to it that we’ll be seeing from other visionOS developers as they explore the unique characteristics of the Apple Vision Pro.

Day Ahead boils your day down to a compact, 3D timeline. The endpoints where you begin and end your day can be adjusted in the app’s settings on a per-day basis. As your day begins, a ring around the outside of the tube advances to show you how far you are through your day. Events are represented by the colored liquid inside the tube, with their position and size corresponding to where they fall in your schedule and the length of each event.

If you look at an event and tap, a small window appears above your timeline with the name of the event and its start and end times. Tap on that window, and the event opens from your calendar with its full details.

In addition to setting start and end times for your day, Day Ahead allows you to display its timeline horizontally or vertically and customize the colors used. The app also shows the current time at one end of the timeline.

I ran into one bug worth noting in my testing. If I closed a detailed calendar view and then Day Ahead and tried to launch Day Ahead again, nothing happened. It seems that closing windows in that order hides Day Ahead from view but doesn’t actually quit the app, requiring it to be Force Quit to set things straight again.

That’s a small bug, though, and overall, I’ve been impressed with Day Ahead’s novel approach to my calendar. It operates a lot like a widget on other Apple platforms, giving me quick, glanceable information about my day without inundating me with too much information. If I see from it that an event is coming up, a quick tap serves as a reminder of what’s on my schedule. Plus, because the app’s window is rendered as a narrow tube, it’s easy to tuck away in whatever workspace I’ve set up for the day or perch it above the window I’m currently using if I have an important meeting coming up that I don’t want to forget. Day Ahead is a simple app, but it’s this kind of experimentation that I hope we see a lot more of as developers get their hands on hardware and begin pushing visionOS to its limits.

Day Ahead is available on the App Store for $2.99.