This is the README for DigitalClock.NIHS.bs.tar.gz [Download] [Browse] [Up]
DigitalClockView Release 1.1 by Matt Pharr pharr@cs.yale.edu (NeXTMail ok, nay, quite welcome) Here's another module for BackSpace that bounces a 180 point digital clock around the screen. Definitely another staple of the screen-saver world, but on the other hand, it's not one of those totally great demos of all the neat animation the NeXT is capable of. The only notable part of the implementation was that it saved the trouble of having to erase the old drawing by making a border of about 6 pixels around the edges of the bitmap, so that whenever it draws another bitmap, the new, displaced, one will totally cover up the old one. I read about that somewhere and only remembered to do it after I wrestled with flicker on the redraw for longer than I should have. I guess that's one of the more basic animation techniques, but heck, I thought it was pretty cool. For black and white folks, it keeps the clock at a steady pure white, but for you bums with color, it randomly moves the RGB values around between 0 and 1. It doesn't end up looking as cool as it could, doing this, because it only redraws the bitmap that has the time in it when the time changes- i.e. once a second, so the color changes aren't nice and smooth... There's probably a neater thing that can be done with color, but given that I can't try out any of my ideas, I'm sort of limited in seeing what works and doesn't... To install it, just copy ClockView.o into your BackSpace.app directory, or into /LocalLibrary/BackSpaceViews. All I ask is that you drop me a letter at pharr@cs.yale.edu if you like it or have any suggestions. CHANGES SINCE THE FIRST VERSION: * Thanks for Sam Streeper for fixing up some incompatibilities with the next release of BackSpace (whenever it comes out, anyway...) * Rob@Lighthouse.Com was kind enough to forward code to draw the time in color, for those blessed enough to have it. * Optimizations to the drawing code, some twiddling with parameters to make it aesthetically nicer.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.