When I first developed astrology software over 13 years ago most users had a history of calculating charts by hand.  Most understood that for a time zone you had to calculate the time it was GMT or UTC from the birth time.  This was because Ephemeris tables are GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) or UTC (Universal Coordinated Time) based. 

These days however we have a new breed of user who has never done astrology by hand and when they go to the Internet to look up a time zone they get a value that is for doing the opposite of what is needed for astrology.  The values on the Internet are for finding the time in a location if we know GMT or UTC time.  Listeners to radio stations like the BBC may have heard things like "it is 1100 hours GMT" and if you wanted to know what time that was in New Delhi you would add 5 hours and 30 minutes because India is ahead of GMT 5 hours and 30 minutes.  If you wanted to know what time it is in San Francisco you might subtract 8 hours because California is 8 hours behind GMT.   But if we the birth time of a person in San Francisco was 8 AM then we would instead add 8 hours to get 1600 hours (4 PM) GMT to get the proper Ephemeris values.  And yes computer calculation algorithms are also based on UTC.

So when I get a comment like this on my "MoonCast Demo" for Android:

"Nothing much here timezone signs are wrong."

We know the user has no actual knowledge of astrology.  Worse yet they may find that because MoonCast is sidereal astrology their Moon sign may well be different.  Of course if I changed the program to use the travel or time of day time zones then even more confusion would reign.  Hence like other astrology software developers I stick the traditional conventions of astrological time zones.

Similar problems have arisen with my desktop programs.  A lot of people think the programs are wrong because they are familiar with their tropical Sun sign and see it different with a sidereal program not even knowing there is such a thing as sidereal astrology even though the program description says so.  But who reads descriptions nowadays?

Jyotish Tools Android Update and Color Scheme

I recently completed an update for Jyotish Tools for Android which adds a nice feature where you can save your horoscope as a picture file in PNG format to your SD card (or external memory).  This can be emailed or printed (there are apps now for printing from Android devices).   This feature has been available with Tropical Skies for awhile but the screen for that program contained all the relevant information so just the screen was saved.  For Jyotish one would naturally not only want the natal chart but the selected divisional or transit chart and the dashas.  The addition does that as a PNG file.

In order to do this efficiently memory wise I had to change the "Theme" for Jyotish Tools from the default or standard theme of a black background and light text to the "Light" Android theme of white background with dark text.  This is a major change in the look of the app and some have written me requesting it.  And naturally you wouldn't want to print a chart that has a black background.  So unless I get objections the new version will be released shortly with the new color scheme.
 
And for those who have requested Tropical Skies via my web site because they don't have the Android Market either in their country or device I will shortly be releasing a version you may purchase through SWReg on my site.

A quick note to blog spammers: your messages are obvious and are rejected.  Furthermore I mark them as spam which means you may find your posted automatically deleted in the future by GoDaddy.