App of the week: Miranda

Welcome back to our weekly spotlight on helpful apps. We focus on a variety of products that are useful for work, personal use, or both, providing our own thoughts on the apps and what you can do with them. This week we schedule meetings for colleagues based across multiple time zones with the help of Miranda.

An intro to Miranda
Have you ever experienced the frustration of trying to schedule a video conference for colleagues spread across the globe in different time zones? Miranda can help with that; simply enter the cities where the attendees are based, change the day and time to when you want the meeting to take place, and send a calendar note to everyone involved – all in one app.

Miranda is a clever piece of kit designed by tech developer SFCD, and it makes working for an international company that much easier. Gone are the days when you had to hunt around on Google to find out what time it will be in Tokyo when you want to schedule a phone call and then go back and forth with your colleagues to get something in the diary. Miranda does it all in a simple interface.

Our review
Those of you who know me might know that I’m American, which means I spend a lot of time organising phone calls and Skype conversations with my family. While we have a schedule down now, it can sometimes get a bit confusing when the clocks go forwards or backwards because it happens at different times in both countries. That’s when I found Miranda, and it has really helped ease the stress of the days when we didn’t realise the clocks had changed and one party ended up waiting on Skype for an hour.

What I like about the app is how simple it is. There’s no “fluff” to get in the way, no extra features that I’ll never use clogging up the screen. A really cool feature appears when you turn your phone sideways – the screen changes from a clock to a map of the world that shows you where it’s night and where it’s day across the globe.

The verdict
Even though I’ve been using the Miranda app for personal meet-ups, I can see where it would be especially useful for PAs tasked with organising meetings with attendees around the world. Or if you need to call an office in Beijing and want to make sure it’s within business hours.

I recommended it to a close friend who works at a company that has offices in three cities in the US, all of which are in different time zones. He finds it very useful because it means he doesn’t have to remember how many hours behind us his colleagues are, which saves him calling them in the early hours of the morning.

It’s simple, but sometimes you need something simple to solve a problem.

Find out more and download Miranda for iPhone at miranda-app.com