Dali is a clock which sports several unique features:
• Round, resizable face
• Customizable font type and size
• Customizable face markings (i.e. the clock can have all 12 numbers on its face, or none of them, or only some of them in any order)
• The clock can follow the customized face markings -- so you can make it go counterclockwise, or in any other bizzare pattern!
• saves its state before quitting
• runs in the background, and uses virtually no CPU time while in the background -- perfect for system 7 users
• also for system 7 -- the clock will optionally switch to the background after launching, so it can be put in the Startup Items folder and still have the finder be in the foreground.
• unlike INIT clocks, it does not patch anything, and the memory it uses is easily reclaimed -- just quit the program.
• and now in full color!
To move the window about the screen, just click on the clock face and drag it around. You can also center the window on your screen by selecting the Center Window option from the Clock menu.
To resize the window, hold the command key down and then click on the clock face. You can also set the size using the size dialog box; just select the Size item from the clock menu.
Memory requirements: Because the clock has a nonrectangular window, it can chew up a lot of memory. The larger the winodw, the more memory that is required to run the clock. Dali is quite happy with 100K on my small SE/30 screen; if you have a larger monitor and make the clock window large, increase its memory size accordingly. Also, running the clock in color can increase the memory requirements, and using the color picker uses up more memory. So if you want to cut down the memory it uses, set the colors once, and then reduce the memory the clock uses. To put a cap on memory requirements, the window's size is restricted to the size of the monitor.
If the clock crashes with error 25, increase the memory allocation.
Some credits:
The clock's WDEF was created from the WDEF that came with Bob's Eyes Pro by Roberto Avanzi. Many thanks to him for the source code for the round faced window! Anyone who wants the source code for the WDEF can get it from Bob's Eyes (available at finer Mac Archives around the net), or can send me a note to receive it by email.
Some of the preference-saving code was written with help from Mark Sproul's preferences.c source code. This invaluable piece of code showed me how to correct my heap-corrupting code. It is hard to debug an error that kills the mac along with the debugger!
And thanks to the people on the net who emailed me suggestions for improving Dali.
If you have any comments, bug reports (I hope not, but this was only tested on an SE/30 and a IIci, both running system 7.1 -- so I have no clue how well this runs under older systems) feel free to send them to me at:
rongut@abp.lcs.mit.edu
or
Ron Gut
129 Franklin St. #318
Cambridge, MA 02139
This program is free, but is not in the public domain. I retain all the rights to it. You may give copies to your friends as long as you include this document with the program and you do not charge for the program itself.
