Disk Clock - Dashboard widget where the faces move and the hand stands still

Animated example of the clock in operation (1.0.1)

The face moves. The hand stands still.

(Time shown is 12 - 1pm in mid December.)

A New Conception of Time for the OS X Dashboard

Ever gotten the minute and hour hands confused? Wondered whether it was AM or PM? Found digital clocks a little too abstract?. The Disk Clock moves multiple disks in what would be the clock face. Each disk has it's own distinct appearance.

Find Your Place in the World

There is only one hand. You know where you are - time flows past, with the future and the past uniformly to the right and left. Hours, moons, and years rotate smoothly through their appointed cycles, conveying multiple layers of information. Color denotes season, day of week, hours of daylight, or simply identifies the quarters of more abstract measures.

Revolutionize Modern Time

Even putting the now in a single place, you may still have to cast your eyes about to find the reference point for a disk. The default configuration features disks with 15-minutes, 1 hour, and 4-hours instead of the usual 1 and 1. Greater locality of the information you need saves your eyes from wandering.

Wonders From Far and Wide

Check out the Gallery of Unusual Time for some of the wondrous times systems - binary, decimal, hexadecimal, and more which I've run across in the process of making Disk Clock. They are either in the program, or may find their way in at some later date.

See It For Yourself

Live Demo

Warning

Because Dashboard is built on web technologies, it is possible to run the widget in browsers which support the same features. In particular, you need a browser with a solid canvas implementation.

Known To Work

Firefox 2.0.0.11 (but it has a memory leak with image disks)
Safari 3.0.4, 3.1.1
Google Chrome 0.2.149.29
Opera 10.0 beta

Known NOT To Work

Opera 9.26 - Extremely angular arcs.
Internet Explorer 7.0 - even excanvas has bugs, and runs slowly to boot.

Download

License: Streetware / Attribution-Share Alike Creative Commons License

Stable

DiskClock-1_0_4.zip.
Size: 156kb
Version: 1.0.4 2009-02-07
Requires: OS X 10.4 Tiger. (Or a browser with good canvas support.)

If you're using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you're using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. Show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget's icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

Latest

The latest version is 1.13.

A Short Tutorial

Screenshot of clock, marked to show areas of interest for telling time (0.12)

About 1:23 pm

The day fills an entire disk, with day and night that move accurately throughout the year. That red mark is solar noon, giving another reference point. (It's around one currently because of Daylight Savings Time.) It appears that it's about quarter past one.

The major marks on the day disk mark out four hours, and the next disk down represents four hours. One hour fits nicely in your field of vision. In this case, we are in second quarter of the hour, a little after 1:20pm

If you need more detail, go down a step; the next disk is one hour, and you can see the individual minutes marked out. The blue highlighted section is 15 minutes, with the marker about three ticks into the second section, or around 1:23pm.

The next disk is 15 minutes, corresponding to the major divisions in the hour disk. In this case, it is just a few seconds past 1:23. Add the fine detail set if you need more precision.

Explore for yourself

Screenshot: a blue line shows days past (0.12)

Screenshot: a red line shows days remaining (0.12)

Screenshot: a yellow line shows the days past start where the cursor is pointing (0.12)

Not sure what a disk represents? Just move the pointer over it - On the left side, you can see the time past in blue. Hover on the right, and you see time remaining in red. Hold the ALT key, and the description will show exactly what is under your pointer, at the end of the yellow arc.

Powerful operators

Three simple operators - add, replace, and subtract - allow you to create your own custom interface that smoothly reconfigures itself in response to pointer hover.

Expand Your Horizon With Add

Zoom out from a day to a year with a flick of your wrist

Change Gears with Replace

Switch between unrelated views, or simply maintain maximum size for each piece of information you need. (You can also run multiple instances and see everything at once) Here a classic clock switches over to a high resolution view where you can watch the seconds fly by.

<->

Screenshot: fine detail (five minute to 1 second) (0.12)

Zoom in with Subtract

Display the information you need all the time - and then drop out the larger scales to read finer detail with greater accuracy. Or come up with your own use - combine any set of disks with any operator to make your own view of time.

The continuous disks are a natural way to look at ancient calendars such as as the Mayan Tzolk'in and Long Count Here, the apocalyptic long count zooms into the Tzolk'in.

Undocumented

The program could use some in-place documentation. Meanwhile, here are some things that aren't mentioned anywhere else just yet.

Press shift while entering or leaving the widget to run the disk animation effects in slow-mo.
Press control to switch out of 'hover' mode.
Press alt to read the description of the time pointed at.
Hover mode will auto-show for a few seconds when switching to Dashboard.
Auto-show won't occur if you've triggered it recently (1 hour by default)

Secret Hacks

A few features are implemented, except that I can't figure out a clean way to make a GUI for them without breaking the widget complexity limit. If you open up index.html, you can find a few configuration parameters in the body onload handler.

Lifetime set: See when your birthday (or a friends) is coming, and look at you life past and future (assuming you live to 80). It also includes a tropical zodiac disk. Set your birthday and the Lifetime set will be available for selection.
hold: lock the clock at a different time to see how things look. I use it for debugging the extremes of the daylight routines.
runFrom: similar to hold, but the clock starts running from that point. I use it for checking daylight savings time behavior.
timeMultiplier: A normal clock is effectively 1. Set it -1 to run time backwards. 2 is double time, while 60 would show an hour in a minute. At high multipliers smaller disks will lock and stop moving. It's fun to watch the daylight change on an accelerated day disk.
skip: name a unit ('day', '~month', 'hour', etc) and time will advance in fits and starts to test the animation engine. The unit is the maximum jump.
Accurate daylight: Set your degrees latitude and longitude to make the daylight calculations on the day disk accurate. If the parameters aren't set, daylight will be calculated for 45 N latitude, and the longitude will be fudged from the timezone offset. Not sure where you are? Try, for instance, Satellite Signals
bedtime: A dark overlay when you ought to be sleeping. It can operate relative to dawn or twilight, or at a fixed time (alarm mode) You can also set how long you usually sleep. There are examples of each mode in the file.
Disks: Set the default startup disks with normal and hover, and use hoverMode to configure how they combine.
autoShow: Initial state of the auto checkbox.
autoShowInhibit: Only performs the auto-show mode if you haven't looked at the clock (as determined by dashboard-activated events) in this many hours.
autoShowDelay: The amount of time to flip to the alternate (hover) display when Dashboard is activated.
startupDelay: The delay before the disks zoom up. It avoids choppy animation from Dashboard's new-widget-ripple effect.

Known Bugs

Bug: The tick mark colors can be wrong in the first quarter of the day disk. (Fixed in 1.3).
Resolved (1.0): The description for the day disk was 'undefined' instead of 'hour'.
Resolved (1.0.1): The animation threshold was too low, and the second disk was animating each step.
Resolved (1.0.2): Handling of scope and closures changed in the newer versions of WebKit (OS X 10.5, Safari 3.1.1), which prevented the widget from running. Thankfully there was only one point that aggravated this feature, and it has been removed.
Resolved (1.0.3): The outer rings weren't showing up in Google Chrome.
Resolved (1.0.4): If only slow disks were shown, the clock might never update under normal dashboard use (brief views).
Resolved (1.0.4): Leaving the mouse over the info box (in Firefox at least) could continuously trigger mouseover events.
SEP: The modifier keys don't generate events in Dashboard - so you'll have to move the mouse to see the effects.
SEP: Dashboard often doesn't give us mousemove events when the widget is on top of another widget.
SEP: If you decide to unpack the widget and look at it in a browser, be advised: Firefox 2.0.0.11 (at least) has a nasty memory leak in the drawImage implementation - don't use a default view with the moon disk for your own safety. The bug is fixed in the v3 beta, so they aren't going to patch it in 2. Meanwhile, Opera and IE/excanvas don't handle arcs in transformed coordinates properly. I'm not including excanvas currently, so you'll have to add it yourself if interested.
Sweet Dreams: Daylight calculations are locked to 45 N latitude, and longitude is fudged by GMT offset. (But see Secret Hacks.)
Sweet Dreams: Certain disks should have configurable start dates, but don't. (But see Secret Hacks.)

See changes for past differences, and latest for future changes.