cairo-clock 0.3.3, the “GNOME anniversary”-release
In order to congratulate the GNOME-project to its first decade of existence, I dedicate the cairo-clock 0.3.3 release to it. I present you cairo-clock 0.3.3, the “GNOME anniversary”-release!
I finally moved cairo-clock to a proper git-repository at f.d.o. The project-homepage of cairo-clock has not yet been updated. A page on launchpad has been started. I still need to figure out how I can hook up my git-repository there, without making a full copy in a bzr-repository.
Added features:
- localized for da, de, en_GB, es, fi, fr, it, nl, pl, pt_PT, ru, sl, sv, tr, zh_CN and zh_TW
- using GOption, GList and GString now
- checking for a composited desktop-environment, thus depending on gtk+ >= 2.10.0
- brand new gremlin/gremlin-24 theme included (courtesy of Christian “ChipX86″ Hammond)
- smooth hand animations
- no more flashing of backgrond-clear-color upon startup
Bugfixes:
- close button in about-dialog works now/again
- work-around for “white rectangle”-bug in Xorg (#11109)
Packages:
- tarball
- Ubuntu 7.04 .deb (x86, 32bit)
Prebuilt packages for other architectures and distributions will follow soon I hope. I’ll keep you updated.
The obligatory screencast…
 (click to play back, ogg/theora, ~5.9 MBytes) |
August 20th, 2007 at 7:59 am
Hi,
I cannot read your video. I’ve tried with both Totem and MPlayer, and none of them reads it correctly: it seems to be displayed with a slight pixel shift on each line (e.g., each line displayed has a few pixels less than the window), resulting in something not really watchable. Any idea?
August 20th, 2007 at 8:23 am
@ Athropos: Do you use the browser-plugin of totem or mplayer? Or did you download the video to your harddisk and played it back from there via a double-click on the video? If you play it back in inside the browser using the totem- or mplayer-plugin I can understand you observation. For further testing see this page (http://macslow.thepimp.net/test-it.html), if you run into similar issues there.
August 20th, 2007 at 10:33 am
Great, I couldn’t think of a more appropriate way of celebrating the GNOME anniversary. Remember the 5 or so clock applets that came with GNOME in ye olde days? =)
August 20th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Hi, nice app there…
But another question: what GTK/Metacity Theme do you use in this video? Appreciate it.
thanks,
trip
August 20th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
@ ReinoutS: No actually I do not remember then. Back then I could not wait for proper OpenGL-hardware/drivers to arrive on Linux. I didn’t care much about clock-applets.
@ tripmckay: The gtk+-theme is "MurrinaOranSoda" using the gtk+-engine "Murrine". The metacity-theme is called "Gilouche". The desktop-background is "OranSoda".
August 20th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
Hi,
I created Japanese translation (ja.po) for cairo-clock.
Could you please merge this?
I put it on a temporal location as I could not mail to you.
http://www.kde.gr.jp/~ss/t/cairo-clock.ja.po.bz2
August 20th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
@ ssato: Thanks! Added to upstream now.
August 20th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
Oh no. It ate my feedback. Here goes again: How about printing the date in a little cut-out at 3 o’clock, like most analog watches? Also, what application font are you using? I really like to lowercase ‘g’.
August 20th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
@ Dylan: That’s something on my mind for a long time now. But I will not address that before the planned rewrite. The font I’m using is called Candara.
August 20th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Your clock looks nice. Would you characterize this more as a technology demo or piece of functionality that is useful on the desktop? Kind of like the proverbial stock ticker demo apps — more of a \
August 20th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
@ Jason: Looks like some of you comment got cut off. I regard cairo-clock to be a nick gimmick and that’s it.
August 21st, 2007 at 7:39 am
@MacSlow: It happens both in the browser and from my hard drive. It looks like that:
http://img377.imageshack.us/img377/7371/screenshotgl1.jpg
It seems that MPlayer complains about an undefined movie aspect, maybe it’s the reason of this problem. I’ve tried you test page, and everything works correctly there.
August 21st, 2007 at 10:25 am
@ Athropos: I have no problems playing back that video with vlc 0.8.6, totem 2.18.1 or gl-gst-player (using the stock version of libtheora coming with Ubntu 7.04). But I guess I know what mplayer might be having problems with. Check if you still have problems with this http://macslow.thepimp.net/clips/cairo-clock-smooth-2.ogg (note that the videos width is 440, which happens to be divisible by 8 without remainder, and not 446 like the original video)
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:50 am
@MacSlow: now MPlayer says "Movie-Aspect is 1.02:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect" and it works like a charm. Thanks!
August 26th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Why can’t I start cairo-clock without Compiz but xcompmgr anymore
?
August 26th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
@ mike: Because I got too many complains regarding the "ugly black rectangle in the background". People didn’t bother reading the FAQ, man-page or README/NEWS. Besides cairo-clock is meant to be used only under a composited environment.
August 31st, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Hey MacSlow,
ok, but is it better if the clock doesn’t start at all instead looking a bit ugly to some people?
Beside I think xcompmgr creates a composited environment and cairo-clock looks great with it
Only the hand for the seconds is lagging a bit in the latest version, but that wasn’t a problem before
I don’t want to install anything big as compiz just yet, so it would be pretty neat if people could stay with xcompmgr (or other alternatives).
Regards,
mike
September 2nd, 2007 at 4:17 am
@ mike: Ok, let me tell you a bit more about my additional motivation for this change in cairo-clock.
I know that xcompmgr would be enough to make cairo-clock look correct. But xcompmgr was never meant to be an everyday-tool to run. It’s just a demonstrator to show how the XComposite-, XDamage- and XFixes-extensions can be used. In addition to that, nobody maintains it anymore. I don’t want to imply/encourage people to run xcompmgr on a daily basis by cairo-clock not doing strict tests (which are available in gtk+ now) for a standard-compliant compositing-manager. I would rather see xcompmgr being extended to properly tell metacity "Hey, your an composited environemtn now!" than keeping this strict test out of cairo-clock. But due to the nature of xcompmgr this is not easily possible, I think.
Regarding the motion of the second- and minute-hands… you do know that you can control their refresh/smoothness in the properties-dialog now, don’t you?
October 12th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Hi MacSlow,
Just got your message. Indeed I know compiz is required. The problem in my case is, my machine is too slow, and will hang after a few minutes of compiz usage.
October 24th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
hi!
clock looks delicious in pics and videos, but on my current ubuntu7.10 box i only get white square in place of the clock. the menu work fine tho. and the app gives no err-messages.
any ideas?
October 29th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
I’ve got a problem with new cairo-clock requirement - I start beryl-manager and cairo-clock from gnome session manager, beryl doesn’t start very fast, so I used to get clock in black rectangle, then in a second or two it disappeared, as beryl started working. Now I just get error and have to start cairo-clock manually later
Can it be fixed somehow? cairo-clock is really missing "force run" option, to ignore this new composite check! Better yet, remove it by default..