Free-Time Lets You See When You Have Some Time To Spare
Free-Time (Free) by Ben Johnson is an app to help you see when you have free time during the day.
Our lives can get busy, and when that happens, it's hard to find time to schedule some time with friends and family. That's the goal of Free-Time, a free app that uses your local calendar data to see when you have a spare moment throughout the day.
The first thing you have to do is go into the Settings of the app. Here, you can input some data that will be the template for every day. This menu consists of Your Day, Your Meals, Sharing Options, and Upgrade.
Your Day will allow you to input when you usually wake up, what time you work, and when you go to sleep. These can all be adjusted with a slider bar. In Your Meals, you can set allotted blocks throughout the day for when you normally eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For the meals, you can also set how long you usually eat for.
The Sharing Options consist of how the default size of your free time blocks look, and you can set it to a full block (whenever time is available) to 1 or 2 hour blocks (easier to share with others for specific times).
The Upgrade option allows you to upgrade to Free-Time Premium, which gives you unlimited emails, texts, Bumping, and no ads. If you opt to not upgrade, you'll keep getting the occasional ad tempting you to upgrade.
When you're done with the settings, it's time to actually view your free time. Hit Done and you will be taken to a listing of days and how many hours of free time you have available. If an entire day is free, it will display "FREE DAY." This data represents when events from your local Calendar.app are taken into consideration.
If you swipe on a day's hours, you will see a ribbon with several icons. It will show you if you have time for your meals at-a-glance, depending on what times you input in the settings. If you don't have time for a meal, it will be crossed out. A calendar icon will also display how many events are happening that day, pulled directly from Calendar.app. The red X will just hide this ribbon.
Tapping on a day will show you events like you normally always see in Calendar, but you'll notice that there will be blocks of "Free Time" in spaces between events. If you tap on one, it will be selected. You can select multiple blocks to share with your friends, colleagues, or family. While these blocks are selected, tap Share along the bottom.
The Share option gives you several choices. You can share by SMS, email, copied to clipboard, or via Bumping. When you don't have the premium upgrade, you are limited to one of each a day.
Free-Time also features a filter option. If you're looking for a time to have a meal, or just a particular time and day, then tapping the button in the top left corner will allow you to do this. You can filter by meal, time block, time range, and day of the week.
While Free-Time is a good app in practice, the execution needs a bit more work. When I attempted to set the time I sleep, the latest it has is 12 a.m. I'm a night owl, and can sleep at 3-4 a.m. or later. It's disappointing to see that I can't set that. Another thing, if you're someone that works graveyard shifts, then this app can't help you either, as it starts at 5:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. The same can be said for the meals as well.
While Free-Time is beautiful and can be useful, there needs to be some more flexibility for people that have different schedules than the ones that Free-Time seems to only include. While the point of the app is to see when you have free time, it would be nice if you could add events right from this app. Not sure if it's possible since it seems to counteract the original intention of the app, but it would reduce some steps for people that are constantly adding in new events and need to check when they have time free.
If you think this app can work for you and your busy schedule, then check it out for free. Those with irregular schedules should wait and hold off until the developers support various schedules.
