Antikythera Mechanism

The controls and sliders don’t work. Tapping the +/- does nothing. Tapping the arrows on the calendar does nothing. And I have an iPhone 11. Mist useless app ever.

In a Getty Museum video it was mentioned there are Antikythera mechanism apps for the iPhone. Thus I came looking for this app. The simulation helps me understand aspects of the mechanism I couldn’t learn from drawings, articles and videos. I finally understand how the moon phase display works. I documented technology for Industry and the military for 20 years; I worked from engineering prints, aerospace assembly drawings, physical prototypes and 3-D computer models to understand and explain mechanisms/processes to our clients. This app is a treasure trove of information. The interior and exterior views are all I could have hoped for. I’ve put this app into a folder labeled Fun, along with an Enigma simulator, which shows you my idea of fun :)

The programming is absolutely wonderful and I think the concept is perfect. However, I find the rendering makes reading the dials on both sides very difficult to read. Also, the controls seem a wee bit, make that, pretty sluggish. How about a higher contrast view and a lock on the side of the mechanism that is to be read.

This thing is really cool to look at, but there's a problem. You see it works on my iPhone SE just fine, but for some reason, it doesn't work at all on my iPad mini 2 running iOS 9.3.5. It just crashes upon opening! I know it's an old OS on old hardware, but this is not an app that needs a whole lot of power. I mean, you can't run the first computer on an iPad that's only a few years old? Come on! I can't even see what it says on iOS! So please fix this, and I'll give full stars, otherwise 2.

Awesome app! Well done! Some thoughts: 1) render the faces of the teeth in slightly different colors. If you zoom in then the white just makes it really hard to see. 2) the ability to "explode" the device - stretch all the parts (or the major components) out in the direction of the axis of rotation - would be helpful to see inside it. 3) there are multiple dials, it would be great if one could click on a single dial (or toggle an option or something) and make transparent all the other parts of the mechanism. So a user could see and understand just the gears that drive (say) the Olympic Games pointer and make all the other parts translucent. If a differential is in use then coloring each path differently would help. The "visible body" app does this well. 4) rotation about all axes would be helpful. 5) some way to see the operation of the pin and slot gear that handles the lunar inequality would be useful. 6) A big ask but a tutorial or guide to give the user an understanding about how each part works would complete this. The "4D" app for explaining the tesseract is excellent for this.

A little bit of historical background information would be nice as well as description of the functionality and just how advanced this device was. Nicely executed.

Kudos for implementing an iPhone version of this mechanism. Flawlessly done and well executed, permitting 3D and multiple perspectives of the external and internal gear's functioning and the presentation of the faces on the outside. A very much larger intended audience does not read or understand Greek or the Cyrillic alphabet. This is a real problem for widespread adoption of this app. It deserves to have an appropriate translation into English, perhaps as an alternative choice available to the user. Keeping it in the original, although initially praiseworthy, is eventually a form of intellectual snobbism. Also an apologia or accessible explanation of the various dials and faces is very necessary. It should not have to be accessed by going to a web page or consulting an academic site. A touch button could make this available from the front screen. Beautiful to look at , but no dialogue is possible with this pretty app, and since it does not 'speak' to me, I must say she is dumb. Visual conversation with her would be so much more satisfying, otherwise she resembles the eye candy of the rich and famous, the inaccessible 0.01% . Bill Murphy