Software people don’t always provide a 24 hour analog clock widget in their applications, but it’s a good idea – if only because it spares users who don’t like AM/PM having to specify times using these options. Here’s a more enlightened developer – Jeremy Dowdall – who has designed the Nebula CDateTime widget for Eclipse:
.
It looks to me like it would be much easier to set the time using this widget than a 12-hour widget. What do you think?
Here’s a snapshot of a lovely animated version of the ‘earth as a clock’ idea that is explored in the design section of this site. The Canadian company called this is it who produced this have also constructed a real 24 hour clock, which you can see on their site.
The earth rotates anticlockwise (what we Brits call counterclockwise). Unusually the animation has adopted to use the 12 hour time system.
Ali Adams has produced a 24 hour clock in Java designed to support Islamic daily prayers.
The five extra hands you see are the calculated times for the 5 daily ritual prayers. Read more at Wikipedia: Salat.
Download the source code here (astroclock.zip 66KB)
.
Chris Kent has written a nice clock application for MacOS and added this 24 hour option. No minute hand!
I’ve updated an old project – a circular calendar – for 2006. You can find it somewhere on the Design page.
If you’re running MacOS X Tiger, take a look at this neat Dashboard widget.
The earth moves anticlockwise, as of course it really does… You can get it at DashboardWidgets.com.
I haven’t yet managed to find any 24 hour analog screen savers, but it wasn’t too difficult to make this one for my Mac, using the Quartz Composer graphical programming environment provided with all Macs.
Download this from the Software page.
