COBASOFT CLOCK

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Features Taskbar Icon
The Cobasoft Clock makes some of your daily jobs easier and faster: The analog clock icon looks good in the system taskbar and it is the control center of the clock. The report helps tracking your computer usage. The alarms and timers can be modified very easily and fast. The clock can copy the current date and time into the clipboard. And it can display the current moon phase as another icon.
Installation is unneccessary, just start CsClock. See also: AutoStart, Private, and keyboard shortcut.
The clock icon ClockIcon shows the current time in analog form. The short, thick line shows the hour, the long and thin line shows the minute and the little dot shows the second. (The display resolution for minutes and seconds is exact up to the second!) The icon has a tool-tip that shows the current date and time. You can click on the icon to start various actions:
right+shift QuickMode Alarm
right+ctrl QuickMode Timer
right Main Clock Menu
The Clock Menu The Clock Options Menu
This menu is shown when you click with the right mouse button on the clock icon.
  Options...
  Close!
  Help...
  Edit Alarms...
  Edit Timers...
  Show Report...
  Copy Timestamp!
This menu is shown when you choose the "Options" entry in the clock menu:
  Edit License Information...
  Edit Alarm Marker Settings...
  Edit Timer Marker Settings...
  Edit Color Settings...
  Edit Report Settings...
  AutoStart
  Private
  No Seconds
  Show Moon
  Uninstall...
Copy Timestamp
This feature copies the current date and time into the clipboard. The string is formatted as specified in the control panel for short-date and short-time. The tool-tip of the Cobasoft Clock icon has the same format.
Alarm Settings
Alarm Settings
The alarm settings window consists of a yellow hint window, an area with 6 alarm colors and the alarm scale. The alarm window works in QuickMode when you start it directly by holding the left or right shift key and clicking with the right mouse button on the clock icon in the taskbar. It will then close automatically after you have set or modified a single alarm. Every tick on the alarm scale represents 5 Minutes. You can choose one of 6 alarm colors by clicking in the color area. You can set any number of alarms (in fact, one for each tick of the scale) and the properties of the alarms are defined by one of the 6 marker types. Each marker type defines the color, text and other properties of one alarm or timer . See Marker Settings for further details. You set an alarm by clicking on the alarm scale or clicking into the color area and dragging into the scale area. You modify an alarm by dragging it around. You delete an alarm by dragging it outside the scale area. The mouse cursor will change to indicate the action. You can press Ctrl-Del to delete all alarms. And with a right-click anywhere in the window you can open a context menu that allows you to close the window, clear all alarms or modify the Alarm Marker Settings. You can also close the window by pressing the Enter or Escape key.
Timer Settings
Timer Settings
The timer settings window works more or less like the alarms window. The timers window goes into QuickMode when you start it directly by holding the left or right control key and clicking with the right mouse button on the clock icon in the taskbar. When you keep the window open long enough, you can see the timer ticks walk left once every minute until they trigger a notification. You can have one timer for every minute and the timers have their own 6 marker types, as described in: Marker Settings.
The alarm or timer notifications look like this:
Notification Message Notification Message For Repeated Events
Alarm and Timer Marker Settings
Marker Settings Dialog
This dialog is used to edit the alarm or timer marker settings. There a 6 markers for alarms and 6 for timers. (You can set 140 timers and 288 alarms but there are only 6 different marker types for each class available). Both marker types have nearly the same properties, but the 'Repeat daily' feature is only available for alarms. The pressed marker button indicates the currently active marker, you can choose any of the 6 markers. The marker name field contains up to 8 characters, these are shown in the hint area of the alarm or timer settings window and in the alarm or timer notification. The Color... button is used to choose a predefined or self-composed color for the current marker. This color is used to paint the alarm or timer indicator ticks and the marker rectangles in the alarm or timer window. By pressing the Run... button you can choose a file that should be started or played when an alarm or timer is triggered. You can also modify the file name directly. WAV or MID files are played directly and you can choose to loop these files until the alarm or timer notification message is closed. Other types of files are started like in the 'Run' dialog of the desktop 'Start' menu. So any application, document or multimedia file can be triggered by an alarm or timer!
Color Settings
Color Settings Dialog
This dialog is used to edit the color settings of the clock icon, alarm and timer windows. You can press the Color button to select or compose colors for any of the drawing elements and you can press Reset to reset every single color to its default. And because a disabled alarm window is automatically shown below the color settings dialog, you can view the color changes by pressing Apply.
The Close button will just close the window without applying the changes.
Report Settings
Report Settings Dialog
Here you can modify the name of the report file and you can enable or disable the report. After pressing Choose File... you can select an existing or new file. A new header is written to the report file if the name of the report file was changed.
Report
The report is opened with notepad, it looks like: Report
The Cobasoft Clock writes the report to a file. A new header is written when a new day starts or when the program is being started. And a new report line is written when the user activates another window. The line contains the current time, the elapsed time since the last window activation change and the window caption. You can use the report to track your own work and that of others on your computer. See also: Private
You can open the Report by Choosing 'Show Report...' on the Clock Menu. A Notepad is started where you can view, modify or delete the report. The report is comma-separated, so that you can import it into other programs easily.
Edit License Information
License
By filling out the license information screen, you indicate that you are the owner of this software. You can obtain serial numbers and registration keys by buying Cobasoft Clock. A valid license makes the "No Logo" option visible in the main menu of the clock, you can then turn the Logo off, if you like. Please read the License carefully before buying our using Cobasoft Clock!
AutoStart
By checking or unchecking the AutoStart menu item, you can enable or disable the autostart feature. If AutoStart is set, then the Cobasoft Clock will be loaded any time somebody logs on to the computer. Cobasoft Clock uses a registry setting for AutoStart, so it is not visible in the 'Startup' folder of the 'Start' menu.
Private
By checking or unchecking the Private menu item, you can enable or disable the Private feature. When it is enabled then the Cobasoft Clock icon will only be displayed for you! Nobody else who uses the same computer will see the the clock although the report will continue to work!
No Seconds
To save CPU time or reduce the number of lines in the report you can check the No Seconds menu item. The clock will then disable the seconds display in the icon and refresh the clock icon and the report only once every minute. On a battery-driven machine this will also reduce the amount of disk writes and save some energy.
Show Moon
By checking or unchecking the Show Moon menu item, you can show or hide the moon phase display. The moon phase icon MoonIcon is shown above the usual clock icon and it displays the moon phase of the current day and time. When you move the mouse over the icon and hold it there without pressing a button, the tooltip will appear and show more detailed information about the moon phase.
Registry Settings
Machine Configuration Personal Configuration
The per-machine configuration of Cobasoft Clock is stored in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE area of the Windows Registry. You can view and edit the registry with tools like 'RegEdit.exe'. It is organized as a tree, like the file system of your computer, and the path to the 'folder' with the startup settings is "\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Run". The entry with the name "CsClock" contains the path to the Cobasoft Clock and it is managed by the AutoStart menu option!
The global settings are in the folder: "\SOFTWARE\Cobasoft\Clock". The entry with the name "Private" controls if the Cobasoft Clock icon is displayed, as described in the Private menu option!
The personal configuration of Cobasoft Clock is stored in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER area and the path to the folder with the settings is "\SOFTWARE\Cobasoft\Clock". If there is an entry with the name 'Log' then its string value will be used as filename for the report file. If the value is missing then the default "%TEMP%\csclock.txt" is used. (%TEMP% is a placeholder for the temporary-files directory.)
In the starting folder and below are further items and folders that contain the color, alarm and timer settings.
Uninstall
You can choose the Uninstall item in the Options menu of the clock icon to uninstall the whole Cobasoft Clock program, all its files and all its registry settings. Be careful with that option because you will loose all alarms, all timers and all other settings and you will have to reinstall CsClock before you can use it again.
Keyboard Shortcut
Usually you open the main menu by right-clicking on the clock icon. But you can also access it by keyboard, for example to copy the timestamp and paste it into a word processor or to set some options. To implement this in a resource saving manner we are using the already existing keyboard shortcut features of Windows. To install it you have to create a shortcut to the program 'csclkm.exe' and set the keyboard shortcut in its properties dialog to the key combination that you want to use for it. You can create the shortcut very easily by right-clicking on the Windows taskbar, choosing 'Properties', going to the second tab, pressing the "Add..." button and then following the instructions of the wizard. Then you have to open the Start menu by right-clicking on the 'Start' button, choosing 'Open' and going to the folder where you placed the shortcut (with the wizard). There you can open the properties dialog of the shortcut and set the keyboard shortcut. With Windows 2000 the above is not neccessary because there already are keyboard methods for accessing the taskbar icons.


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Copyright (c) since 1999, Karl-W.Geitz