PureBasic Forums - English

What, another transparent clock? Hasn't it been done? Yes, it has. By me and others. But - I've never been particularly pleased with a few of the features of my earlier VistaClock, in particular:

- Won't run on 16-bit desktop
- Stops while being moved
- Second hand jumps rather than moving smoothly
- Filesize is 547k upx'd
- Uses 16mb system memory when running
- Many programming tricks employed to reduce cpu usage

I felt that this clock would make a good testbed for some of the new commands in my upcoming GdiPlus library, so I revisited the project with a view to testing out my lib. The result is:

- Will run fine on a 16-bit or 32-bit desktop
- Keeps running while being moved
- Second hand sweeps smoothly
- Filesize is 61k upx'd, one-ninth the size of VistaClock
- Uses 4.7 mb system memory
- No CPU conservation tricks are necessary - uses no cpu at all (here)

Wanna try it out?

http://www.networkmaestro.com/TransparentClock.exe

*new* Screensaver http://www.networkmaestro.com/TransparentClock.scr



For those using Windows 2000: TransparentClock.exe will now work in your OS, no need for a separate version.

Hope you like it! The lib is still in development, but when it's ready I believe almost any reasonably experienced PB programmer will be able to write something similar with little effort.

Can you give a not-upx'ed version? I am having problems installing UPX on my machine. Thanks!
EDIT: I want the not-upx version to make some tests like trying to run it in WINE, etc..

No problem - done.

UPX is just an unpacker, it doesn't need to be installed to run the exe.

netmaestro wrote:No problem - done.

Where is the exe? Is it the same link?

UPX is just an unpacker, it doesn't need to be installed to run the exe.

Read my post carefully. This time using the glasses I bought you with the hasselhoff sticker in the lens

Same link, same filename.

Wow - only 50% usage.

Sorry - one of my pngs was bad. Should be OK now.

looks very nice, but on my system it uses 19% CPU.

my system:
AMD Athlon XP 3200, Windows XP with latest updates.
[edit] that fixed the CPU usage, near 0% [/edit]

Yes, it should be fixed. Could you redownload and try it again?

On my system, hovers around 2-3% usage. Nice!

It actually is drawing everything on every pulsation, which is kind of unheard of when making something like this. I thought I could get away with it based on not using any DrawAlphaImage, but I guess I'll have to start drawing the base once a minute. Then it won't use any.

Thanks jack!

Switched the base png for a tiff, dropped the cpu usage on my wife's celeron 1.5 from 5% down to 0. So it should be zero everywhere now. Latest version is 113k not upx'd. Still drawing everything every pulse.

Please re-download for 0% CPU usage.

0 % cpu here. Very impressive.

cheers

whoops - spoke too soon. holding just around 8% now. Still impressive.