• To set the background color for a city, double click on the time display directly above the city's name in the popup menu.
• Holding down the command and option keys will flip the time to a date display.
• A + or - in front of the time display indicates tomorrow or yesterday respectively.
• Time Palette will beep if it does not have enough memory to open a window - try a smaller font or a lower quality map - or increase the program's memory size by choosing Get Info in the finder.
About Time Palette…
Choosing this item will display credits, copyright and shareware information.
Preferences:
If you have many fonts installed, there will be a slight delay in opening the preferences dialog box. This will be much faster in the next major release.
Display Font / Size:
Allows you to choose the typeface and type size for the time displays. Note that when using the Kanji version of Time Palette, you should use a Japanese font such as Osaka.
Display Seconds:
Toggles the time between hh:mm:ss and hh:mm.
Use Zone Names:
Toggles the appending of the time zone name, such as "PDT" or "EST".
Number of Clocks:
You may choose between 1 and 10 clocks, the width of the display is determined by the longest city name, given a font and size. Using the default cities, 10 clocks will fit nicely on a 21" (1152x870) display, using Geneva 10pt.
Window Title Bar
This option will toggle the title bar on the time window. You can still drag the window by clicking and dragging on any of the colored time displays directly above the city names.
Transparent Map / Transparency Level:
Toggles solid / transparent night shading on the map. Specify the level of transparency in the range 0-65535. (0 = 0%, 65535 = 100%) Using transparent shading allows you to see the map shaded darker (but not solid black) and requires a lot of processor time. This option is only recommended for fast computers (fast 68030 systems or any 68040).
Map:
There are 4 choices: B&W, 16 Shades of Gray, 256 color & true color (16 bit color). This allows you to set the color depth of the map display. Whatever you set it to, the program will try to use. If your monitor is unable to display the number of colors you have chosen, it will be made to look as good as possible under those conditions.
For example - you may wish to set the map to gray scale which uses less memory than color. The table below describes the options.
Black and White: Basic map - best choice for PowerBooks and low memory situations.
16 Grays: Nice looking map for low memory situations
256 Colors: Very nice looking map - shows ocean terrain.
True Color: The best map - performance of transparency option is increased.
Daylight Savings Time:
Check this box when your local time zone is on Daylight Savings, the program uses this information to calculate the time in other cities.
Your Location:
Enter your offset from Greenwich Mean Time in the format +/- 00:00 (i.e. +3:30, -11:00). The plus or minus sign is very important. This is described in detail in the Getting Started Chapter of this document.
TIME ZONE CONFIGURATION:
Double click on a city in the list to bring up its settings. You can change the settings for a particular city and click on "Set City Info" to record your changes. To exit the dialog box while saving your changes, click on "Save & Exit".
Usually, pressing Return will exit a dialog box, but I chose to force you to click on a button so you would not accidentally lose information. I am open to any comments on this decision.
Absolute vs. Relative:
Some places start Daylight Savings on an Absolute Date (ex: Seoul, Korea - April 10), while others start on a relative date (Chicago, Illinois - First Sunday in April). Absolute dates are the same day every year - relative dates fall on different days each year.
DST Observed:
Check this box if the city observes Daylight Savings Time.
Std. / Daylight:
Enter the 3 letter time zone abbreviation for both Standard & Daylight Time, such as "PDT" or "EST".
+/- GMT:
Enter the selected city's offset from Greenwich Mean Time in the format +/- 00:00 (i.e. +3:30, -11:00). The plus or minus sign is very important. This should be entered in the same format as Your Location in the preferences dialog box. Of course the value you enter here should be different than Your Location unless the city is in your time zone.
About the Daylight Map:
The map used here is over 600 pixels wide. Therefore those of you with 9" black & white screens, Color Classics, and 12" monitors will not be able to see all of the map. This was a decision I made based on the size requirement of the program. I did not want to have to have 2 copies of the map at two different sizes as this would greatly increase the size of the program. The decision was also based on the fact that most small displays are on slow computers and opening the map is very computation intensive.
When drawing the night time shading in 256 color mode, if it is transparent, more colors are "created" (Darker blues in the nighttime ocean for example). For this reason, certain levels of transparency work best in different depths.
For 256 colors the recommended transparency level is 42000. For the others it doesn't really matter as just about anything will look quite good.
The math involved here is quite complex. To refresh the map all at once would take far too much time. Therefore the map is slowly updated in the background over a period of 90 seconds. If you alter the system clock, it will take up to 3 minutes for the map to reflect the change. To force it to update, close it and open it again.
Because of the complex nature of the map calculations, some machines will be slow to open it. Once it is open and running in the background, the performance hit should minimal.
Some sample times to open the map:
Mac SE: 45 seconds in B&W
Quadra 800: 2 seconds in 256 colors with transparency on.
Time Differential:
This dialog box will allow you to find the time in one city, given the time in another city. Enter a Time and Date for the selected city. Select the 2nd city for which you'd like to find the time based on the first city, and press return.
Elapsed Time:
This dialog box will allow you to find the time between events in different cities. Enter the two times, and select the cities. Press return to calculate the elapsed time between the two events.
Alarms:
Three alarms are available. Each may be set to go off at any time in any time zone. Check the box, to activate the alarm. Time Palette must be running in order for the alarm to go off. (It may be running in the background and does not need to have any windows open).
