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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