Having an iMac in the living room

Posted by dom Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:15:00 GMT

I have an 17 inch Intel iMac in my living room, next to a nice HD-TV to which it is connected via miniDVI to DVI, and then DVI to HDMI cable. This is more or less my home server, it runs all the time. Since it runs anyway I had the thought of putting a clock on it. So off I went and did a simple Quartz Composition just displaying the time in big Helvetica, in a 24ish yellow color, including seconds.

I quickly decided that this variant had two major flaws, and a minor:
  • when you display seconds on a digital clock, there is always the need of everyone that is visiting to constantly look at that clock
  • quartz composer is way to inefficient for this job, because it always displays at full framerate even when no changes are done if at least one time based patch is in the composition. I don’t know why it does it, but having 60 identical frames per second rendered isn’t something I accept here. When removing the seconds display, they become 3600 identical frames. Moreover if you use share screen, the vnc server will try to update as quickly.
  • just big fat yellow helvetica is not beautiful enough.

Thinking about how a nice clock might look like, it came to me: the iPhone unlock screen clock. Perfect. That is a clock I want to have in my living room. After some hours I got my result, a nice looking iPhone clock as a quartz composition. Feel free to use it anyway you like – I put it under a BSD license. I’d suggest you put it in ~/Library/ScreenSavers and use it as screen saver.

Two problems solved, one left to go: efficiency. Okay, so what I really want is a clock that is updated once every minute. And I want to have it on all the time, not only when the screensaver is active. This way I have a nice clock on the second screen when I use VLC or Quicktime to view Videos. And I want it as backdrop so I can use the second screen if I want to (my HD-TV is main screen so front row will present itself on it). So hereby I present iPhoneClock 1.0. It renders about one frame every minute and places an iPhone like clock on the Desktop Background of your display. If you have more than one display attached it will choose the display where the menu bar is not. Both the Composition and the App require 10.5.

Share and Enjoy!

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  1. ed said about 13 hours later:

    Very cool...

    One thing, on my MBP, it shows the time again (8:39 PM) just left of the date. It only does this on the LCD screen, and not my external monitors. Any ideas?

  2. Stefan said about 13 hours later:

    very nice idea - but it does not work on 10.4. just shows »hello world« instead of the time.

  3. dom said about 13 hours later:

    @Stefan: yes it is 10.5 only. I forgot to mention that.

    @ed: this is due to a setting in your screen saver preference pane. just untick the "show with clock" checkbox below the list of savers.

  4. ed said 1 day later:

    Doh! Je suis idiot!

  5. tobias said 11 days later:

    very cool it works at background too.

  6. Sebastian said 15 days later:

    knock knock,

    ne Uhr gibts doch schon lang. Sehr retro: http://domanske.de/2006/07/fliqlo-bildschirmschoner-uhr/

  7. werbemail@swissonline.ch said 15 days later:

    Na ja nicht besonders gut,

    Auflösung viel zu grob, und bringt den Screensaver zum abstürzen.

    Hee aber euer Podcast ist gut :-)

    Gruss urs

  8. dom said 16 days later:

    @werbemail: was hast du für ne mac os x version? die composition rendert auf voller Auflösung, da dürfte nix grob sein. Was genau stürzt bei dir ab? die Preference Pane oder wenn er wirklich läuft?

  9. Ralle said 26 days later:

    Passt zwar nicht zum Blogeintrag, aber kennt ihr eigentlich gobby (http://gobby.0x539.de/trac/)?

    Was haltet ihr davon?

    Gruß, Ralle

  10. Josh said about 1 month later:

    Is that 'gobby' a open source version of subethaedit?

  11. Ronald said 2 months later:

    Hmm.. ich hab gobby gerade mal ausprobiert und finde es echt toll. Wo liegt denn der Vorteil von Subethaedit?

  12. map said 2 months later:

    Ich bin wahrscheinlich der falsche Ansprechpartner was eine objektive Einschätzung angeht, aber ich denke SubEthaEdit unterscheidet sich vor allem durch die bessere, weil native, Integration mit Mac OS X und wesentlich umfangreichere Features sowohl was Editieren als auch Kollaborieren angeht. (Im letzteren Falle z.B. auch die neuen Features von 3.1 die es im Video auf der Webseite zu betrachten gibt.)

    Wer sich selbst ein Bild von den Vorteilen machen will, kann das mit der auf der Webseite verfügbaren 30 Tage Testversion tun.

  13. Yogi Patel said 2 months later:

    That's pretty slick looking, nice.

    However, I noticed it still renders like crazy, not every once in a while. Were you able to get some efficiency improvements in? I'd be interested in learning what you come up with (I'm trying to learn QC). Thanks!

  14. dom said 2 months later:

    The screensaver is rendering like crazy and there sadly is nothing one can do about it other than wrap the composition in a screensaver bundle app which i didn't. the app does only render 3-4 times a minute.

  15. The spirit said 7 months later:

    is there an option two use iphoneclock on the main screen and not on the second one? would like to use it as "wallpaper" for my main screen

  16. vtv said 7 months later:

    Geiler schoner

  17. paul said 8 months later:

    how did you place this app behind the desktop icons? setLevel doesn't work for me. or do i have to choose a hillariously high (negative) value?

  18. Schocki said 9 months later:

    Genau was ich gesucht habe. Danke :)

  19. Peter said about 1 year later:

    Bleibt leider hängen beim Schneeleoparden, 10.6.1

  20. Marco said about 1 year later:

    Bei mir auch ein Problem auf 10.6.1: Läuft zwar, schreibt die Ziffern bei fortschreitender Zeit aber übereinander!

  21. map said about 1 year later:

    Wir arbeiten dran.

  22. Peter said about 1 year later:

    Und gibt es schon Neuigkeiten? Ich vermisse die Uhr sehr...

  23. Julian said about 1 year later:

    Alternativ könnte auch diese Clock hier interessant sein: http://macthemes.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=16793914&p=1

    Frisch für 10.6 aktualisiert :-)

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