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Chinese calendar is a celestial calandar. The 2 most important rules are:
- New moon marks the start of a month
- Winter Solstice must fall in the Month 11
The average length of a month is 29.53 days, and length of a year is 365.25, the cannot divide each other, so comes leap month. Leap month does not have an Even Solar Term in it. Traditionally, leap month is calculated between the beginning of the new moon day to the day before the next new moon day, but this is local time dependent, in different timezone, new moon day may shift by up to 1 day, so the leap month can be very different whe calculated in different timezone. A way to eliminate locality is to calculate leap month between the exact new moon moments, thus leap month will be global, and does not depend on the local time. In this app, user can choose from either of the 2 methods.
Chinese time is consisted of Hours, Quarters and Subquarters. One Chinese hour is 2 hours. One Quarter is 100th of a day, which is 14.4 minutes. The 12 Hour and 100 Quarters consists of major time telling, by saying x Quarters after x Hour. Since 14.4 min is not a whole divider of 2 hours, 1 Quarter is further divided into 6 Subquarters, which is 2.4 minutes. Subquarter is the greatest common divisor of Hour and Quarter.
Besides calendar, the positions of the 5 major solar planets plus the Moon on elliptical plane, plus sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset time are also important elements in Chinese calendar. These planet positions, especially Jupiter and Saturn, are traditionally used to take note of the year. Here, they are marked by colored squares on several rings.
- Chinese calendar month, day, hour and quarter
- Ecliptic positions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Moon
- Exact moments of New Moon, Full Moon, and 24 Solar Terms
- Sunrise, set, astronomical noon and midnight, as well as moonrise, set, and at meridian time
- Several lunar date holidays can be displayed either in status bar or one-line widget: 1.1, 1.15, 2.2, 3.3, 5.5, 7.7, 7.15, 9.9, 8.15, 10.15, 12.8, 12.30
Chinendar can run on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and visionOS
The circles from outermost to innermost are Year, Month, Day, Hour. Each will progress as time goes by. On the year ring, 24 Solar Terms and all New Moons and Full Moons are indicated by ticks. If any of these celestial event fall in a given month/day/hour, they are marked by a semi-sphese on the inner circles as well. At the center is the text description of the date and time.
The Ecliptic positions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Moon are also shown as marks on the outer-most ring. Sunrise, sunset, and moonrise, moonset are marked in the 2 inner most rings. Geographic location is needed for this calculatioin, so the app will ask for permision upon first launch. If you feel unconfortable about reading location, you can also provide it manually.
Many UI elements are configurable, like the color of the rings and marks, along with the displayed date, time, location, and timezone. Location and timezone are not stored anywhere, while other configurations like the colors will be stored so that they can be used upon next launch.
Widgets are supported on all eligible platforms. On mac and iOS devices, widgets are similar to the main App UI, so you can glance all information anywhere you choose. On watch and iOS lock screens, widgets provide count downs for moon phase and solar terms, as well as intraday events like sunrise if location service is enabled.
There are both pre-built Siri command and also ability to customize workflow via Shortcuts.
3 pre-built command are:
- Open Chinendar App:
Open Chinendar - Convert a date to Chinendar date:
Chinendar date,What date is it in Chinendar - Check the date & time of next event:
Chinendar next event,Chinendar next <Solar Term/Moon Phase/Sunrise or Sunset/Moonrise or Moonset>
All these can also be uses in customized shortcut, with the ability to add parameters to narrow down results.
In settings - Date, you can either select a Gregorian date and check the corresponding Chinese calendar date, or the reverse, specify a Chinese calendar date and check what Gregorian date it falls into.
Themes you create are synced through your iCloud account, so you can easily use your favorite theme everywhere. You can also export themes to txt files, as well as import form files, a great way to share wonderful themes with other people.
Chinendar allows you to view multiple local times at once, each of which you can choose the timezone, apparent or standard time, hour format location info etc. Any holiday in a local time will be displayed alongside the date and time as well. This feature is called "Time Wall", available to all devices including the watch.
This app is open source and licensed under the GPL v3.0.