SunClock is a nifty little application that shows what part of the world the sun is shining on. The shape of the shadow changes with the season. It is a port of the UNIX program sunclock. The first time I saw sunclock was on a Sun 3 running SunView back around 1989, and I thought it was a pretty neat program. Since the Mac is so insanely cool, I figured it was just a matter of time before someone came out with the same program for it. So, I waited...
... and waited...
... and waited.
Well, a couple of programs that sort of did the same thing did come out, but they sucked. One was a HyperCard stack, so it doesn't really count as a program. The other was OK, but it did all this other stuff that I didn't want, plus I used it once to change my timezone and it screwed up my PRAM. I couldn't get my Date & Time control panel to set correctly until I zapped my PRAM. The author wanted something like $25 to get rid of the shareware dialog so I could fry my PRAM more efficiently. No thanks.
So, 8 years later, I finally got off my butt and ported the UNIX source (it has always been public-domain) to the Mac, and prettied it up a bit.
How does it work?
Pretty simple. Run SunClock, and you get a little map window which shows where the sun is. Click on the window to move it around. The default settings for SunClock are a small window with an aliased shadow, but you can make it look nicer. In order to work, it is important that your time zone be set correctly in the Date & Time control panel. It also helps to go to your Map control panel and set your machine location.
Settings
There are four options available under the Options menu:
Remember Window Position
When checked, the application will start up with the window where it was the last time you quit. When unchecked, the window always appears at the top left of the screen.
Show Machine Location
When checked, a little push pin appears at the location you have set in your Map control panel.
Anti-Alias shadow
When checked, the shadow line is smoother, when unchecked, it is more jagged. You can save memory and processing time by turning this off, but it doesn't look very nice.
Large Window
When checked, the SunClock window appears full size, when unchecked, it appears half size. The smaller window is quicker and uses less memory.
Memory
SunClock is set to default to a 460K partition. If you uncheck the anti-alias shadow and large map options, you can squeeze it into 260K on a PowerMac with VM on, but if you try and enlarge the map or do any other funny business you will get an error. The reason it takes so much memory is that I do a lot of stuff into offscreen bitmaps to eliminate flickering. So, if you want to make it leaner, start with 260K and play around from there.
SunClock is completely free. Give it to all your friends and make sure you remember to tell them what a great guy I am.
SunClock has a web page at http://www.cuug.ab.ca:8001/~dattad/sunclock.html
The Suntools version of sunclock was written by John Walker.
The X11 version (from which I lifted some source) was written by John Mackin, who in turn lifted some of his source from the original Suntools version (ain't freedom of information wonderful?).
