A New Plasma Clock
After the so much loved analog clock and the relative screencast I did some time ago to present to the world the first plasmoid ever, it’s time for a little replica.
The new clock I made is more modern and fresh, and it’s digital. It’s made to look like the big informations that you can find in the train stations, the ones who flip down to change what is written on them.
Working both in Plasma and in Oxgen is really worthwhile to create these nice stuff. ;-)
So, here it borns this clock. And this is just the beginning, because both me and Nuno have a continuous flow of ideas of new features and cool effects we can implement into it, at the point that Nuno yesterday said that “this is going to be the best plasmoid ever”. And I really hope so. ;-)
For the pretty pictures, viva Nuno!
I made a little screencast, so you can see how nicely it animates. Unfortunately it has been a bit fucked up with the colors, so here’s a screenshot to see how it really looks:
Seconds will be added, as the code that makes the animation is pretty fast, but we still haven’t deicided where; they can be little and near the minutes, or simply a ‘:’ flashing.
Have fun! =)
Comment by Bob — July 22, 2007 @ 12:52 pm
Does the clock fit into the tiny space on the right side of the taskbar?
Most people don’t even see the desktop, so a clock on the desktop is kind of useless.
Comment by ruphy — July 22, 2007 @ 1:05 pm
Sure, that’s the main concept under Plasma. =)
This clock will also be the one on your panel (maybe smaller?), on your desktop, on top of the applications, basically wherever you want! =)
Comment by Diego — July 22, 2007 @ 1:42 pm
beautiful!
you guys are doing an amazing work! :D
keep up the good work!
Comment by anon — July 22, 2007 @ 2:05 pm
Nice work.
By the way, the analog clock could use an overhaul. The digits are a bit too big (especially the long dash at the bottom of the “1″ makes them too wide), not correctly centered to the full hour dash (e.g. 6, 9, 12, 1), the gaps to the hour dash are sometimes too small (e.g. 2, 4), sometimes too big (e.g. 7). Especially the 10, 11 and 12 are almost overlapping because of the too wide digits and reach too far into the middle of the clock.
For reference: http://commit-digest.org/issues/2007-05-27/files/3clockies.png
These ones look better because of the better placement of the digits (zoom out for the last one, it’s a nice big template):
http://www.ars-imago.ch/images/DRoomClock.jpg
http://www.xtremtuner.de/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/clock-template-by-opalcat.gif
Comment by batiste — July 22, 2007 @ 2:39 pm
Beautiful! Can’t wait for this on my desktop!
Comment by Bob — July 22, 2007 @ 3:14 pm
Great, thanks for responding! The date at the bottom might be too small to read if reduced to the size that would fit in the taskbar.
Comment by vincent — July 22, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
Hi Riccardo,
nice plasmoid.
Could you give some explanation about Oxygen style (widget) and the new development.
Thanks you
Comment by kde.fan — July 22, 2007 @ 4:05 pm
Congratulations, great idea!
I only suggest one thing: the animation of the numbers needs to be a little bit slower, to become more realistic. In real life, when a number changes, you can see the plate (with the number) rotating.
Anyway IMHO this design is better than the other clock, is different than the M$ stuff, so it need to be the default in KDE 4.0.
Sorry for my poor english.
Bye
Comment by Trever Fischer — July 22, 2007 @ 10:47 pm
So, whats with putting the date text into the SVG? There are other languages than English, you know. Other formats too. Just having the painter draw the text seems a bit more efficient too me…
Comment by nuno pinheiro — July 22, 2007 @ 11:11 pm
great work riccardo!
about text and multiple language suport, of couse we can do that, but what i dont want to do is leave to the discretion of a distro to include or not include a sertain font that makes the theme look good, right now that way worked perfectly…
Comment by ruphy — July 22, 2007 @ 11:45 pm
@Bob:
Scaling means intelligent scaling, not just a dummy resize. ;-)
The elements will be moved and expanded, as needed.
@kde.fan:
nuno made me do the animation lasting 0.1 secs, he said that it will look much better in the long term.
@vincent: yeah, I think I will sometimes soon
@Trever Fischer, nuno:
The date is actually embedded in the svg, but I was considering of just drawing text instead. And every day it passes I’m more convinced I’ll do that
Comment by ii — July 23, 2007 @ 5:36 pm
I’d like to see this, but can’t be bothered with the downloading hassle. How about youtubing it?
Comment by David Vignoni — July 23, 2007 @ 6:48 pm
fantastico
Comment by Chani — July 23, 2007 @ 8:43 pm
sometimes I like to have the seconds visible. sometimes I prefer flashing dots. make it configurable like the existing panel clock :)
heck, maybe you can reimplement all of the kde3 clock features eventually? I really like it just the way it is. although it seems to me that some features should be available on any clock plasmoid, regardless of how it displays the time. I don’t know much about plasma, though, so I’ve no clue how to get consistency there.
Comment by Luis — July 24, 2007 @ 12:47 am
It looks beautiful.
BTW, what about the new widget style? I liked how the old one look, but it didn’t have contrast, Is this going to change in the new one?
keep the amazing work.
Comment by ruphy — July 24, 2007 @ 11:11 am
the old bad contrast was just because of the palette, not of the style itself, and we weren’t able to change it as the ‘colors’ module of kcm was broken.
Comment by asdx — July 25, 2007 @ 3:27 am
aseigo just committed this: http://bddf.ca/~aseigo/plasma_background.png
Comment by AlexeiSergeev — November 16, 2007 @ 1:07 am
How about to add reflections? =)
I mean http://bddf.ca/~aseigo/plasma_background.png here there could be reflections of digits at the bottom. You know that nice effect used with album art in amarokfs etc.?
Comment by anonymous — November 16, 2007 @ 10:45 pm
What if you made the clock pulse every second?