You can display clocks with different time zones, which is useful for traveling halfway around the world (or calling someone who lives halfway around the world).

To create clocks, tap the Clock icon on the Home screen and tap the World Clock icon along the bottom of the display. It takes only two steps to add a clock:

The initial clock and any clocks you add sport a daytime face (white background and black hands) from 6 a.m. to 5:59 p.m., as shown in Figure 3-2, and a nighttime face (black background with white hands) from 6 p.m. to 5:59 a.m.

Figure 3.2. Add a clock for any time zone.

To remove a clock, tap the Edit button in the upper-left corner of the display (refer to Figure 3-2) and then tap the circled minus (−) button next to the clock to delete.

Time is on your side with your iPod touch. You can set multiple alarms to go off on different days and set a variety of tones and sounds for your alarms that play through its speaker. Follow these steps:

When the alarm goes off, your iPod touch displays the message You have an alarm (and the date and time), along with the Snooze button if the Snooze option is turned on (refer to Step 6). Slide your finger to unlock the iPod touch to stop the alarm's sound, or tap the Snooze button to stop the alarm temporarily and let it repeat 10 minutes later. (When it goes off again, slide the unlock slider to turn it off — don't tap the Snooze button again, you're late for work!)

To delete an alarm, tap the Clock icon on the Home screen and tap the Alarm icon along the bottom of the display. In the Alarm list, tap the alarm you want to trash and then tap the Edit button in the upper-left corner of the display. The alarm appears with a circled minus (–) button next to it; tap this button and then tap the red Delete button that appears to delete the alarm.

You can set an hour-and-minute timer for anything — baking cookies, baking CDs, or baking in the sun on the beach. The timer built into the Clock app will continue running even when playing music or videos or running other iPod touch apps. You might want to use a timer to see whether a set of activities — playing songs, playing videos, selecting from menus, and running apps — occurs within a specific time. (If you need to use seconds as well as minutes and hours, try the stopwatch, which I describe later in this section.)

To use the timer, follow these steps:

The timer runs backward. You can touch Cancel to cancel the timer or wait until it runs out. When it runs out, the iPod touch plays the sound (if a sound is set) and presents an OK button. Tap OK to stop the sound.

Let the good times roll

Lots of games use the iPod touch clock to measure time. Some use it against you: Super Horsey (see the vertical figure with the chess piece) is a very challenging game that puts you in the role of the traditional chess knight who must complete the labyrinth before the time elapses.

If speed is the issue, SlotZ Racer lets up to four people race slot cars on a single iPod touch. You can compete for laps or against the clock in Time Trials and drive an endurance race (with simulated days and nights). SlotZ Track Editor lets you create the slot-car track of your dreams, with huge and detailed tracks that you can trick out with jumps, bridges, and scenery.

If you enjoy role-playing games that take you on a journey with humor and storytelling (like Zelda, Pokemon, Dragon Quest, or Final Fantasy), try Arvale: Journey of Illusion, which offers over 20 hours of game-play, six immense continents, 280 maps (see the horizontal figure with a map), 200 monsters, hundreds of items (including wheelbarrows), and thousands of laughs. And in Rock'n'Roll, you've messed up your enemy's music game, and all the notes have scattered over an island — it's up to you to roll through each level to collect these notes. Once all the notes are collected, you move on to the next level. But in Rock the Clock mode, there are another 15 levels that must be beaten in the time provided. Good luck with that!

You can use a stopwatch with a lap timer for timing exercises, jogging, race laps, how long it takes the bus to travel across town, or how long your friend takes to recognize the song you're playing. Whatever you want to measure with accurate time to the tenth of a second, the stopwatch is ready for you.

To use the stopwatch, follow these steps:

To adjust the brightness, first tap the Settings icon on the Home screen and then tap Brightness, which is near the top of the Settings screen. The Brightness screen appears with a slider that shows the brightness setting, which ranges from low (a dim sun icon) to high (a bright sun icon). Slide the brightness slider's knob with your finger to the right to increase the brightness (toward the bright sun) and to the left to decrease the brightness (toward the dim sun). Of course, the brighter the screen, the more power it draws from the battery.

While you're at it, why not wallpaper your display? You can make your iPod touch display a stylish background when it's locked. You can also put up photos or other images from your photo library as your wallpaper.

It's not like you'll see it often — the iPod touch displays the wallpaper image only when you first press the Sleep/Wake button. After you swipe with your finger to unlock your iPod touch, the wallpaper is replaced by the Home screen or whatever app you were last running.

To set the wallpaper, choose Settings

Tap a thumbnail to select the image for your wallpaper or tap the Wallpaper button in the upper-left corner to return to the Wallpaper menu. After tapping an image, your iPod touch displays the Move and Scale screen, which lets you optionally pan the image by dragging your finger, and optionally zoom in or out of the image by pinching and unpinching with your fingers. Tap the Set Wallpaper button to set the image as your wallpaper or tap Cancel to cancel.

Don't want to hear the keyboard click as you type, or the snap noise as you swipe your finger over the "unlock" message? You can set which events can trigger sound effects as well as the volume of the sound effect.

Choose Settings

Perhaps nothing is more personal than your physical location. Your iPod touch can triangulate its location with scary precision, even though it has neither a cell phone nor the location-determining technology known as GPS. (The iPod touch's cousin, the iPhone, does have both a cell phone and GPS.) The iPod touch does this by leveraging the most extensive Wi-Fi reference database in the world.

Why should you care? The Maps app can find your location on the map, which is very useful for getting directions (see Chapter 12). Other apps (such as Showtimes, Eventful, WhosHere, and various travel apps) can grab this physical location information and use it to help you find things closer to you.

You can turn Location Services on or off by choosing Settings

After turning it off, your iPod touch prompts you to turn it back on if you run an app that makes use of Location Services (such as Maps).

If you need to, you can set restrictions that

Choose Settings

Set the restrictions you want by tapping each control's On switch to turn it off. By default, all controls are on, which means usage is allowed (not restricted). Turn off a control to restrict its use.

To turn off all restrictions, choose Settings