![]() I took some liberty with dimensions, colors, and materials. Here’s a 3D model of that clock I created in Blender: One of the benefits of designing icons using 3D modeling software is that once you’ve decided how the subject will look, the creation of its model is a more ”technical” process rather than artistic one. I should at least mention the Blender Texture Disc, which contains many nice and useful textures and materials. There’re also many discussion forums and resources on the Web. Then just read as much of the Blender User Guide as you need. You can find many tutorials on Blender on the Web, but I recommend going through a few simple ones quickly. It took a few days of reading and experimentation to learn enough about Blender to do what I wanted (but obviously Blender is capable of much much more). In fact the only software I used for creating the clock face for SimpleDockClock was the GPL 3D modeling software Blender. Short of really learning to draw properly :-), I describe below my attempts to get acceptable results with the help of software tools. Recent hardware and system software advances have raised the bar on how good these must look even higher. I’ve always found design of icons and other graphic elements to be a challenging task. SimpleDockClock is another one of those programs whose artwork took me much longer to do than their programming. ![]() Note, however, that redistribution of SimpleDockClock or its parts is prohibited. Change the dimensions, origins, etc., hard coded in ClockController.m, if necessary. Replace ClockFace.png, HourHand.png, and MinuteHand.png with your own images. The appearance of the clock is customizable too, albeit not too easily. Drag its application icon to the dock to “reserve” a place for it there. Simply add SimpleDockClock.app to Login Items in the Accounts panel in System Preferences to run it automatically every time you login. The binary requires at least Mac OS X 10.4 to run, but obviously it also runs on 10.5. It still works!īut here’re the source code and the binary of my new SimpleDockClock. For those who prefer a “floating” clock, I posted some code for that a long time ago. I wish someone else has written it and let other people use it for free. So I found myself writing this quick little application (and trying out Xcode 3). So everytime I upgraded, I copied Clock.app to the new Applications Folder and that has worked.īut Clock.app from Jaguar no longer works for this purpose on Leopard. It’s also not distracting like a “floating” clock. The dock is a logical location for it because the date is shown on the dock icon for iCal. But the analog version is just too small. System Preferences lets you display a clock on the right side of the menu bar. In fact since Panther, Apple hasn’t provided Clock.app in the Applications folder. One of the things I miss in Leopard is having an analog clock in the dock. Talk about being the opposite of an early adopter! All my other Mac’s were running Tiger before so I’ve only used this new version of Mac OS X for a few weeks. ![]() I recently bought an aluminum iMac, and it came with Leopard.
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