Joe Ganley

I make software and sometimes other things.

 

Due to Blogger's termination of support for FTP, this blog is no longer active.

It is possible that some links from here, particularly those within the site, are now broken. If you encounter one of those, your best bet is to go to the new front page and hunt for it from there.

Most, but not all, of the blog's posts are on this page; the archives are here.

 

I have always been fascinated by clocks. Their mechanical design, their artistic and industrial design, the way people relate to them and to time itself, all intrigue me.

One theme that I riff on from time to time are approximate clocks. These are clocks that only show about what time it is, to varying degrees of accuracy. After all, sometimes it just doesn't really matter that much. Long ago, I thought of making a clock that only read night, morning, mid-day, afternoon, or evening, or one that shows just the current season. At a somewhat finer resolution, but still pleasing, is Laurence Wilmott's It's About Time clock, which reads the way you would tell someone what time it is; for example, "almost noon." This one shows only the day, and this really interestingly shows just the hour.

A while ago I made this one that displays nothing but the year. Here is a more accurate, but still rough, one that I threw together:

This works only on browsers that implement the CANVAS tag, and even some of those (e.g. Chrome) don't implement the text API. So if you're not seeing it, it looks like this. I'm not sure all of the context left and right of the current hour really contributes anything; I considered just showing the minutes bar with the current and next hours' text to its left and right. I have some other ideas in this same vein that I'll be posting soon.

Here's another one I made:

I'm not sure that one really tells you much that you couldn't get by looking out the window, but it looks cool. BTW, I cheated; it doesn't actually compute sunrise and sunset, but just divides the globe evenly into hours. (If you're on a non-CANVAS browser, it looks like this.)

While I'm on the subject, here are some other interesting (though not approximate) clock designs:

Labels: , , ,

0 Comments: