wmspaceclock

Screenshots

(The light-blue border is my fluxbox slit, it will be replaced by the background of the dock of your window manager.)

Description

wmspaceclock (or spaceclock for short) is an antialiased analog clock for the Window Maker dock to show the current local time. wmspaceclock falls under the GPL (GNU General Public License)

I wrote this program because I haven't found a nice antialiased analog clock for my fluxbox slit. After searching the net I found only pclock and astime, but neither had the cool antialiasing hands of asclock_applet shipped with GNOME. I found the AfterStep version of the GNOME applet, but it didn't have that nice antialiased theme I wanted so much.

The clock I liked most (though I wouldn't really use it) was wmfishtime by timecop <timecop at japan dot co dot jp>. I had a look at its source code, this was the one which inspired me to write my own clock applet. pclock was the second on my list, it lived in my fluxbox slit until I finished spaceclock. Also I have stolen some background pixmaps from the pclock distribution.

Spaceclock uses a simple algorithm utilizing a subpixel mask to draw antialiased polygons. It could be enhanced further both in memory usage and output quality with a smarter algorithm, but the currently implemented approach seem to be acceptable for me.

Why spaceclock? This is simple: I am a member of a small scene group called (SpaceHawks). It was pretty straightforward to use the word "space" . Also, it is very useful to fill the unused space on your screen...

Features

Window Maker dock applet (may be used with BlackBox of FluxBox as well)
Antialiased analog clock display
Background image loading via gdk-pixbuf
Configurable hand shapes via config file
Approximately 6-levels of transparency in current rasterizer implementation
Themes
Written from scratch using C++

Requirements

gdk-pixbuf is required to compile spaceclock
STLport or other high performance STL implementation highly recommended (the version compiled with STLport uses 20 times less CPU time on my Mandrake 8.2 system with gcc 3.0.4)

Bugs

Configuration file loader should report more descriptive errors instead of throwing a never catched exception. Config file parser may have to be rewritten to fix this.
Segfault may happen if hands are too long and they are drawn outside of the 64x64 pixel applet area. Some checking may be approriate in the rasterizer algorithm.
Background pixmaps having other than 64x64 pixel size may result to unexpected behaviour. Possibly a meaningful error message would make sense.

Major changes

1.0 initial version
1.1 fixed local time display
1.2 implemented exact option
1.2b pthread fix for BSD systems
1.2c various fixes
1.2d missing theme files added, new pclock theme thanks to Thomas Otto

Download

Current source spaceclock archive
Sourceforge project page

Todo

Rasterizer quality should be improwed a bit.
Alpha channel for hands would be nice, it would make sense for the radar theme at least.
Some themes with shadows could be created.
Exact option is implemented now, but some things might be possible to make it more accurate.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alexander Kourakos for his excellent clock applet called pclock. I used some nice pixmaps from his archive to make spaceclock look even better.

Thanks to Timecop for the cool wmfishtime clock. I based parts of my program on his work.