If you just bought a new iPad and have searched in vain for the built-in Apple Clock app, here's some bad news -- there isn't one. Apple just doesn't think the Clock app looks good on the big screen. Luckily for us, however, App Store developers don't share that belief. In fact, the developers of Night Stand for iPad show just exactly how to do it right.

Main screen

Night Stand for iPad is so much more than a basic alarm clock. In addition to the time on the main, rather gorgeous, display, you can also see the date and current weather conditions. There are also four widgets that can be enabled at the bottom of the screen for Twitter, Facebook, RSS, and Weather.

Behind the main clock, Night Stand for iPad will play through your defined slideshow. It comes preinstalled with beautiful videos and has more available for purchase. Each movie series is $0.99, or you can buy all four series for $1.99. If you prefer a slideshow of still images, Night Stand for iPad also includes 3 beautiful images with more available for purchase. You can also have a slideshow of your own images if you prefer. The interval times for your slideshows can be anywhere from 1-60 minutes.

Sliding your finger up and down the main screen will adjust the screen brightness and flicking left and right will hide and show the clock display.

Widgets

The Twitter and Facebook widgets let you view recent posts and status updates from their respective social networks. Tapping one of the posts will popup a built-in browser and displays how that post looks on the web. If you want to reply, like, or comment, you'll need to login to the social network in that browser. To the left of each of the widgets, you'll find the button that lets you tweet or post to Facebook.

The RSS widget is tied to Google Reeder and displays recent posts from your feed. Tapping on a post will also slide up the article in a nice, stripped-down, easy to read view. To view the article in safari, tap "Full Article".

The weather widget displays a 10 day forecast of the weather. Include with each day is the general weather (partly cloudy, clear, light rain, etc), the low and high tempertures, wind speed, and times for sunset and sunrise.

Alarm Clock

The alarm clock lets you add multiple alarms seth with custom repetitions, similar to the iPhone's alarm clock. Night Stand for iPad includes 9 alarm sounds, many of which are actually very load, alarming, and annoying. I mean, seriously, who wants to wake up every morning to the sound of a smoke alarm going off? (Immediately after typing that sentence, my husband piped up that he loves the annoying sounds for an alarm, so apparently some people do like them). Many people actually prefer waking up to music, so Night Stand allows you to add music stored on your iPad to wake up to. However, if you want to wake up to music, you have to make sure Night Stand is actually running on your iPad overnight. Otherwise, Night Stand will send a notification to wake you up instead.

In the alarm settings menu, you'll find the options to shuffle your selected music, the duration of snooze, and if you want the alarm sound or music that you chose to fade in over time, so as to not startle you awake. The durations range between 6 seconds to 30 minutes.

Sleep Timer

In addition to serving the purpose of waking you up in the morning, Night Stand for iPad also has a sleep timer so that you can listen to music while you fall asleep. The interval times range from 5 minutes to 23 hours and 55 minutes. Wow.

The Good

• Gorgeous
• Include Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds
• Ability to tweet and post to Facebook
• Included movies and images are beautiful
• Inclusion of weather is very convenient
• Can wake up to own music
• Can have slideshows of personal images
• Supports Fahrenheit, Celsius, miles and kilometers
• Includes alarm clock and sleep timer
• Multiple alarms
• Can make the main clock small and position in the upper right or left corner

The Bad

• Not enough alarm clock sounds. Should have more subtle ones.
• The popup for Twitter posts isn't scaled properly. You have to scroll right to see the entire tweet.

The Conclusion

Night Stand is a gorgeous alarm clock for your iPad. I love how it isn't just a clock, but a host for all the things I like to check before rolling out of bed. I used to use my iPhone as my alarm clock, but with the discovery of Night Stand, my iPad will be playing that roll from now on instead.

$2.99 - Download Now

Hickory Dickory Dock is an iPhone and iPad app meant to teach children how to read a clock. It includes many mini games, interaction with the mouse, and it of course ties in the famous nursery rhyme with the same title.

Help your children learn to read a clock while being entertained by a playful little mouse companion. There are a number of mini games designed to develop specific skills, while all the time keeping the child entertained with humorous animation and sound effects.

• Learn numbers 1 – 12 through interactive games
• Learn the hours and their position on the clock face
• Interact with the mouse and learn more of this classic nursery rhyme
• Provides early exposure to an abstract concept within an accessible narrative framework.

Hickory Dickory Dock is available on the iPhone and iPad for $2.99.

[App Store link]

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Dominus plus is an artistic clock for the iPhone - time is displayed as colorful dots.

The simple, elegant design of this clock is very appealing to me. I could stare at it all day.

Dominus. Simple, enjoyable and timeless artwork clock.

• am/pm clock marked with different colours
• one alarm set-up
• timer up to 60 minutes
• 3 different chimes for hours, quarters and minutes
• 3 different types of alarm sounds
• easy mode navigation though 4 corners
• app select sound on/off
• backlight time display on/off
• autolock on/off
• help available after shaking

Dominus plus is available on the iPhone and iPad for $0.99 each.

[iPhone - App Store link] [iPad - App Store link]

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Here's an interesting twist to an alarm clock: once you stop the alarm, it literally tells you today's weather conditions and the latest news. All you have to do is listen.

• Live Weather conditions for the current day
• Live Temperature for the current day
• iPhone 4 ready. High-definitions graphics for retina display
• 40 beautiful and different sounds.
• Background alarm enable
• Alarm with iPod music
• 5 actions for gesture: Snooze, stop alarm, stop weather voice, light on/off
• 4 different colors for clock numbers and images
• 13 different backgrounds.

If you pick this one up, let us know what you think! Screenshots after the break.

[$0.99 - iTunes link]

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Unlike the iPhone 3GS, the iPad doesn't have built-in stocks, weather, voice memo, clock, calculator, or compass apps. It does, however, have the brand new iPad App Store, and yeah... there are apps for all that!

Check out our picks after the break!

Bloomberg for iPad [Free - iTunes link] offers not just stocks but news, company info, price charts, trends, analysis and... you get the idea. It could just be information overload on a 9.7" screen, but that's likely just what you stockies want!

Weather Channel Max [Free - iTunes link] costs nothing (thanks to Toyota) but packs in the weathery-goodness. Full screen, customizable maps, in-motion radar, local, regional, and national video, and more make it not so much of a replacement as a escalation.

Voice memos for iPad [Free - iTunes link] is the "I can't believe it's not butter" of replacement apps. It looks similar to Apple's iPhone Voice Memo app, but it's scaled up to iPad size. Unlimited recording, tagging, pause, levels, timer, and email options make it a great fill in option.

Clock... We haven't found a good replacement for Clock yet. If you know of one that matches the functionality and the grace of the iPhone Clock app, let us know in the comments. And developers -- make a good one, with a great icon. Seriously.

PCalc Lite [Free - iTunes] or PCalc [$9.99 - iTunes link] make the iPhone calculator look anemic by comparison. It includes an optional RPN mode, multiple undo and redo, unit conversions and constants, a couple of themes, and much more in the paid version.

Compass HD + Vector Magnetometer / Gravitometer [Free for now - iTunes link] is an app that, frankly, we may not be smart enough to properly describe. It has absolute mode, north mode, declination mode, and relative modes, and a bunch of different display modes for acceleration visualization. Get it while it's free!

So there you have it, App Store to the rescue! Did we miss any (other than clocks!)? Are there alternatives your like better? Let us know in the comments!

Why are there no Clock, Calculator, Voice Memo, Weather, or Stocks apps on the iPad? Because Steve Jobs didn't think they worked on the larger iPad screen, according to Daring Fireball's John Gruber.

It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who.

Gruber was responding to theories that these apps would instead be offered as App Store downloads, or could be part of some secret widget dashboard implementation. In other words, that it's a design issue, not a technical issue.

However, new UI that would make the iPad an amazing bedside clock (how's that for a Lock Screen), or show Stocks with a variety of graphs and related news and data, or weather for several days and cities at once, certainly seems possible for Apple's UI wizards. Perhaps they simply lacked time to re-do the apps for the already extended April 3 release date?

Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps. At least that’s the story I’ve heard from a few well-informed little birdies.

Speaking of which, any little birdies hear anything about an iPhone 4.0 sneak preview event yet? Or is everyone just focused on getting the iPad out right now?

Source: Daring Fireball

We already told you that 1.1.3 hasn't been all it's cracked up to be, but one of the issues with the ROM slipped by us. Namely: some people have been experiencing SMS messages getting listed out of order. Threaded text is the best thing since, well, SMS, but it doesn't do much good if your texts are all out of order.

The problem arises when you don't have your iPhone's clock set to update automatically from the network time and your iPhone thinks it's one time, the carrier another. So presumably the SMS app lists incoming texts by their carrier-based timestamp and yours by the internal timestamp -- a mismatch means out of order texts.

The fix - turn on automatic updating and deal with whatever hassles that might bring you if you travel between time zones a lot.

(via Engadget Mobile)