As a litigator, I frequently need to calculate dates. I often just ask Siri to do the calculation — “Hey Siri, what is 65 days after April 4?” — but it is nice to see all of this worked out on a calendar, especially if you need to adjust dates. Time Jump is a date calculator app that has a slight learning curve when you first start using it, but the app lets you do some pretty sophisticated date calculations. The developer of the app sent me a free code to try out this $2.99 app. I’m impressed, and I recommend the app for attorneys.
Basic features
You use Time Jump in landscape mode because the app mostly consists of a single screen with a calendar on each side of the screen. When you start the app, both calendars are set to today. If you tap a date in the future on the right side, the app calculates the difference between the days. If you tap a date in the past on the left side, the app does the same thing. (The calendar on the left always has to have a date on or before the calendar on the right.) Change a month either by swiping up/down or left/right.
The main calculation done is the difference between the two dates. If I tap March 30, 2017 on the left and April 25, 2017 on the right, Time Jump tells me that those two dates are 26 days apart.
Time Jump also tells me that those two days are 17 business days apart. Business days are calculated by excluding weekends and, if you have any holiday calendars selected, by excluding holidays. You can adjust all of this in the app settings, accessed by tapping the gear at the bottom of the screen. For example, if your business week runs Tuesday to Saturday, you can tell the app to exclude Sundays and Mondays when calculating business days.
Date Calc
For me, the most useful function of any date calculator is the ability to count days in the future, which this app calls “Date Calc.” For example, let’s assume that today I received a favorable decision from a state appellate court, and I want to know when the 30 days will run for my opponent to file a writ with the Louisiana Supreme Court. Yes, I can manually count 30 days in my head (after reciting the “30 days has September” rhyme), but it is better to see it clearly shown and calculated on an iPhone screen.
On the left side, I select March 30, 2017. That’s easy to do by just tapping on that date on the calendar, but you can also double-tap on the large number above the left calendar to bring up a date wheel to quickly jump to a specific date.
To select the number of days forward that you want to count, tap the top middle of the app, and a screen comes up to select 30 days. (The default is to count by Days, but you can also count by Business Days, Weeks, Months, or Years.).
Even before you tap done, you can already see the 30th day in the top right. To see this day on a full calendar, tap done. Here, I see on the calendar on the right that the 30th day is April 29, which is on a Saturday. Thus, I know that the real filing deadline would be Monday, May 1.
Holidays on a calendar are marked with a blue dot under the day, so if for example I were to see that the 30th day was on a day with a blue dot, I would know that the actual deadline is the following day.
If you tap on a day in either calendar, the date is shown in a large number above that calendar. Tap on that large number to see more information on that day, including an explanation of why it is a holiday (if applicable), the day of the year, the week of and the month of the year.
Holidays
Holidays can be complicated to account for in any date calculator, but they are handled very well in this app. First, there are lots of built-in lists of holidays to choose from. The Federal (standard) list includes all of the major holidays. Tap the words “Federal (standard) to see the specific dates on that list, and you can manually turn on or off any of those holidays if they do not apply to you.
The Federal (optional) list includes holidays they are typically not work holidays, such as Flag Day and Halloween.
There is also a full set of U.S. State holidays that you can optionally enable. Here in New Orleans, for example, Mardi Gras is a work holiday for virtually everyone, and the Louisiana list includes Mardi Gras and Good Friday. If you need to select a day as a holiday which is not on any of the app’s lists, you can designate any other day using the Personal Day Off feature, which is fully described on the Time Jump website.
As a test, I decided to configure Time Jump to correspond to the court holidays of the Civil District Court for the Parish of Orleans (New Orleans, LA). There is a complicated Louisiana statute which governs holidays, La. R.S. § 1:55(E), but it is easier to just look at the page of the CDC website that lists the holidays. To accomplish this, I turned on the Federal (standard) list which gave me most of the holidays (except that I needed to turn off Columbus Day which is not a holiday here). Then I turned on the Louisiana list, which added Mardi Gras day and Good Friday as holidays. Finally, I needed to manually add holidays for All Saints Day, the day after Thanksgiving, and the day after Christmas.
Your own calendar
In the Settings portion of this app, you can choose to show events from your own Calendar. Doing so is a two-step process. First, turn on the switch next to Show Events From iPhone Calendars. Next, tap the words “Show Events Form iPhone Calendars” to select which of your calendars to show in Time Jump.
You will now see green dots on days on which you have events on your own calendar. If you are like me, you’ll have a green dot on just about every day. But this is still useful because, for example, if you do a date calculation and determine a filing date, you can look at your calendar and see that you are already scheduled to be in a deposition all day long, and thus you can plan accordingly.
Conclusion
The interface of this app seems a little clunky at times. For example, it took me a while to figure out that, in the app settings, you often need to tap on the words in the title of a setting to get more options. That wasn’t intuitive to me. But I’m willing to live with the problems with the form of this app because the function is quite useful. This app lets you perform pretty sophisticated date calculations, and the dual-calendar layout and indications of holidays makes it easy to figure out what is going on. Time Jump is now my go-to app for date calculations on the iPhone.
Click here for Time Jump ($2.99):
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