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The Steampunk Clock/Calendar is going live at last |
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Monday, 03 January 2011 |
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 The Steampunk Clock/Calendar is going live at last. Version 0.16.4 will
be the one that will be transformed into version 1.0 (or Mk1 in 'old
speak'). When it goes live it means that most, if not all bugs have been
identified and fixed. It also means that all the functionality that I
wanted the clock to have has been implemented, one way or another. Since
0.16 became the release candidate there have been four minor releases,
the first fixed the chimes, they stopped working after I introduced a
minor bug. I created a proper 'about us' page with pertinent information
and links back to the lightquick site for copyright, terms and
conditions, privacy policy, new downloads and for online help. FYI - The
about us page is called from the standard Yahoo menu drop-down and as
the third help canvas. There are now three drop-down canvases which are
accessed by clicking on the brass toggle on the top left of the
drop-down canvas. The alarm canvas used to pop out on the first press of
the A toggle but now it pops out as the second help canvas, the reason
for this is that the pop-out used to interfere with the natural setting
of any alarms.
Whilst on the subject of alarms I have tested the setting of the alarms
numerous times and they all seem to work as expected. The setting and
usage of the alarms seems to be intuitive and the feedback I have had so
far seems to be positive. Once the alarm setting is activated you can
click on an individual alarm toggle and it will allow to change the
setting for that alarm. Also, you can now disable the alarm
functionality through the back end. All alarms will be ignored if set to
silent.
Previously it was possible to set the sound from loud to quiet mode but there were no other volume options. This worked fine but I realised the
functionality to mute the clock altogether was required when switching
your system into a gaming machine. When playing a game you really don't
want the clock to be ticking and alarming at the same time. There was no
room to create a new brass toggle on the left hand side of the clock and
I was fed up with creating more toggles on the right hand side. Instead
I added the hand crank. The crank handle turns off the sound altogether,
it operates when the clock is in both loud or quiet modes. I added a
clockwork noise to the crank handle.
Some other minor changes include animating the clapper whenever the bell
is required to ring.
I also made a change to fix a problem encountered on some Windows PCs.
Whenever one of the counters was rotated an associated sound is played
for each individual rotation. There was a strange delay effect on some
PCs encountered when the digital clock counter was rotated. I did dome
digging and realised that some PCs have audio plugins that come into
play to process the sound whenever an audio file is played. The delay in
loading one of these plugins slows down the rotating counters. The
solution was to either remove the plugins (impractical) or disable the
animated counters. To get round this problem there are two back-end
preference to turn off this functionality and to set the delay time on
the rotors.
So, that's the changes to 0.16 to make it live. The new version is ready
for download now on the Lightquick download page. It has also been
submitted to the Yahoo Widgets gallery and will be available there as
soon as the Yahoo widget team review it and publish it. I am gratified
to say that over 3,400 downloads have been made so far, so more than
just a few really do like it. I was hoping that a few more would be
bothered to rate it but that is life. If you do read this please rate it
here: http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/steampunk-clock-calendar
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Last Updated ( Friday, 16 September 2011 )
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