xdaliclock
More info
- Creator
- Jamie Zawinski
- Released
- Type
- Clock
- Website
- jwz.org/xdaliclock
Jamie Zawinski's X11 clock whose digits melt into one another as the time changes, a nod to Dalí with roots on the Xerox Alto in 1979 and one of the earliest programs to use the Shape extension for transparency.
Steve Capps wrote Dali Clock for the Xerox Alto in 1979 and brought it to the Macintosh in 1984, where it became one of the little programs people showed the machine off with. Zawinski ported it to X in 1991, a year before XScreenSaver, and has maintained it ever since. The trick is not an animation of pre-drawn frames but a morph: each digit is stored as line segments per scanline, and when a 3 has to become a 4 the segments are interpolated over a number of frames so the glyph flows into its new shape.
The -transparent flag turned it into a showcase for Shape: the window is clipped to the exact outline of the digits, so the desktop shows through between them and nothing but the characters is clickable. That put it in the company of oclock and xeyes, the non-rectangular windows that demonstrated what the extension was for. Zawinski has since built the same clock for Palm, iPhone, Android and the browser, with essentially the same morphing code.