I can go to a couple of sites I visit and be a troll "Hey man my computers got a fungus"
Seriously it sounds like fun.

Seems to go OK on my XP SP2 machine here. I'll leave it running for a wee while and see what happens. Bloodly lovely set of features!

Got a suggestion for you tho (doncha hate it when you want something tested and the suggestions roll in instead? ). Skin Scaling. That LCD skin is HUGE! I'm on poor little 1024x768 here.

Haha, while writing this review the hourly chimer went off. Boy howdy it just goes on and on at midnight!

Ah, something I just noticed. I'm running the subliminal skin. It doesn't really like my midnight time here for a couple of the time format settings. Neither does LCD. Appears to be a number formatting thing.

Dunno if beatnik would have the same problem, but a couple of the time formats don't fit in the tube skin.

Any plans for supporting rainmeter skins? I *so* want this skin - http://www.customize.org/details/40646

So far (only been running for 15 mins, but have cycled thru a few skins) memory usage is stable at about 3mb normal, 3 and a half virtual.

Lovely looking clock. I'll leave it going for a while and see if it crashes on me. Good Job!

Run on log of what I notice (XP):

#1 - Change skin > Click Apply > Nothing happens, clock stops updating > Click OK > Skin changes, clock starts ticking again
#2 - Middle click on app > Transparent areas become visible, clock stops updating, stops responding to right click (permanently)
#3 - Middle click on app (again) > app becomes translucent

Other than that, it seems to be working. But I just took a quick look. Synchronising works fine. Dragging skins works (after a restart to get rid of the above problems).

Have downloaded... Will report back tomorrow, when I've had it running a while!

I'll second the Apply thing, seems to affect other settings. Can't remember what (it was *very* late when I was looking last night).

You'll pick it as soon as you read my post, but that dodgy time thing was the clocks that have a digital display, in 24hr format they're not too keen on midnight.

Walked into the PC room this morning to find my PC chiming at me, had me confused till I saw the clock! Alarm was still going 3 hours later. Nice!

Memory usage is still sitting where I left it, almost 12 hours later. Don't think you've got any leaks in the digital style clocks. Couldn't find an analog one small enough and I'm too lazy to make my own

Lookin good so far

Win2K
When clicking on the skin tab I get the following error:
Program Error
fungusClock,exe has generated errors and will be closed by
Windows. You will need to restart the program

An error log is being created.

Darrell, I'll download and test this and report back. Good to see you posting again! Dan, good to see you posting again as well! It's like a class reunion

Heh, I've got 'net at home now, decided I'd get back to some of the spots I used to hang at. Most of them are dead!

Sure is good to see some familiar names tho

Hey all.

Thanks for the great feedback and offers to help out.

Hi again Carl. The name comes from a desktop replacement thingy I've been working on for years that I call "the fungus" since it seems to have gotten into every part of my desktop. Hopefully this clock will become an applet/plugin for that system one of these days.

Re: the bad Win2K bug you found, first thanks. Second, I think I know what it is. Just to make sure though, since I haven't been on any MS OS except XP for several years now, 2K does NOT support themeing (styles?), correct?

Dan, hey there, long time no see. That LCD skin is the reason why I decided to update the app. Ghrone and its skins are just way too good to let go stale. And then I ran across the SysMetrix skins and all was lost.

If you crack open the ini, there's a setting called Scale that you can tweak for now to downsize Ghrone skins. 0.5 will halve the skins size, etc. I haven't enabled it yet since I ran across the small subliminal skin. I'm now leaning towards putting in a "make skins that are bigger than X, this big" setting, or maybe something else? any ideas are welcome.

There's also an Alpha and a FastBlend setting in the ini that aren't yet supported in the GUI. Alpha controls the overall visibility of Ghrone and SysMetrix clocks; 0=transparent, 255=opaque, in-between settings give some level of desktop translucency. This will probably be applied across all skin types eventually.

Set FastBlend to 0 and the app will do a better job of anti-aliasing the SysMetrix bitmapped clock hands, at the expense of many more cpu cycles. It will also make the "sweeping" second hand appear to jog back and forth due to a bug in the algo, but turning off the "Smooth analog second hand" setting makes it unnoticable.

I'll look into the midnight time bug. Thanks for finding it.

The tube skin is actually a TheClock skin. I haven't been able to get TheClock to recognize any skin other than the first one I changed it to, so I can't say for sure what it will do display-wise with that skin. And I can't find any ini or reg settings for it either, so I dunno. I've also been having quite a bit of trouble getting fonts in general to display the way I want them to, so maybe that's the problem.

Re: rainmeter, I didn't know it did clocks. But first I need to get in touch with the various clock devs for the clocks that are still in active development to make sure that I'm not stepping on anyone's toes. Then, we'll see. If rainy says okay, I don't see why his skin type couldn't be added as well.

Hi crae. You always were a great beta tester. Thanks for catching the Apply button bug. Seems I forgot all about that little button there.

Don't know what to say about the middle button bug since I've never had a 3 button mouse, but I'll try and simulate it to see what happens.

I won't be able to respond to any other posts made on this thread for a few days, but I'll definitely check back here as soon as possible.

Lots of familiar names in here

This is nice redlar - my new default clock. Just one problem (for me), I run dual display and it wont go on to my secondary monitor.

I'll have a play and come back with a better report later

All we need now is for doreen to come do a triple post and it'll be skinz all over again

I haven't found a clock I like yet, but fungus seems very sweet. Build in some more alarms/todo's (very very simple, just a bit of text and a when to go off) and I reckon you'll have a butt kicker here.

I'd be all for the "minimum skin size" concept. I bailed, edited the ini file, then loaded up again with one of the smaller skins. Hoo boy was it small!

Something else I noticed, the tooltip sticks on till you click the clock again. Is that deliberate? I dunno whether I like it or not, its sorta handy, but a bit large.

Ooh, just thought of another feature. Make the tray icon configurable I love it when apps let you do that, breaking out reshacker always seems a bit nasty

redllar: Forget what I said about that middle click behaviour. Turns out another app (WinRoll) was interfering (WinRoll lets a middle click on a title bar make the app go translucent and rolls up on right click).

/me goes get Doreen so she can triple post

No time for triple posting right now...

I don't use Windoz too much anymore and reformated the partition that had WinXP but still have Win98SE and Win2K.
I did a google on win2k themes and it seems that it does have support.
Win2K Theming

hehe! plastic has a msg on the bottom that says: "Making two posts in less than two minutes is not allowed"
He's crippled me?

/me goes d/l red's clock thingy and then go listen to: ColdPlay - Clocks now that he put that on my mind.

This is very cool! Love the alarm feature (and nice default chime too)
will play w/ this alot more later on.

Thanks! =)

haha, PMSL! Maybe if you ask plastic really nicely he'll put in a very special IP filter in that'll let you post more than once a minute

I'm digging that chime feature myself. Its a handy reminder that I've been surfing waaay to long, its time to do some work now

I get this error message/crash "The exception unknown software exception (0xc06d007e) occurred in the application at location 0x7c57e592." when I click the Skins tab in the Properties dialog. I'm on 2k sp4.

Hi FnaD =)

Red this seems to be working pretty flawlessly on my XP system...
I'll get kicked for this but can you add customizable images/templates we can browse and set to the alarm that will pop up on the screen along w/ the chime? ppl can design about 5-10 diff reminder pop ups for their repeating reminders something to that effect. (gives a quick visual of what the reminder is for)

Have not had time to see if this has .png support I only see .gif atm.

If not thanks anyways, this is a keeper...

oh multiple alarm support too! (me has two kids need many alarms!)

/me runs away quicly now...

*Blush* nevermind about the .png support seems the majority of the skin files were .gif but I found one that is .png (so it seems to support multiple image formats) Hooray!

Thats cool Darrell. I dont experience any errors except for the tooltip "flickering" alot when using a beatnik style skin. Just wondering when the updated version arrives...

(Thanks PK cuz I needed to post again and Plastic is gonna kill me)

Something like this: http://users.adelphia.net/~dor/index.html
so we can make skinnable .png pops up to trigger w/ alarms.

I only push my luck on the net cuz nobody can reach me physically to slap me =)

Umm you guys are lucky I jusss noticed this edit button here...
"If" you decide you wish to impliment this feature I'll even make some default pop ups for your clock just let me know and send me your e-mail address.

I hope I did not chase him away again? Come back red I was jusss kidding! (but I coulddd even make masculine pop ups for the guys instead of those girly ones I posted?)

/me kills no-one, 2 minute limit only there to prevent double posting, you just go ahead . Seeing Redllar's plans with this he might just implement your wishes, his net access is just not as widespread as common these days.

As long as he don't dissapear on us for tooo long after giving us a teaser...

Hi all. Thanks for the continued testing and interest.

I've uploaded an update to http://www.geocities.com/redllar for you to try out.

I think I fixed the Win2K bug and I've added limited support for 98 (no alarm or chimes and the OS must have extended graphics support).

I should have been more precise about my time away. I drive a semi for a living now, so I don't have access to the net except when I get "home," which is usually after a week or so away. But I do have a laptop so I am able to get some coding done. Just don't expect any timely responses on my part, okay?

Andy, for now, setting the "Snap to desktop edge" Count to 0 (General tab) will allow you to drag the clock to another monitor, as long as that monitor is not above the primary monitor. I'm going to change the clock moving code to take care of that problem as well.

Dan, the midnight bug should be fixed. I've also added initial support for RainMeter clocks. There are a couple of different ones in the update zip, one of them is the Lumen clock you were interested in. Support right now is very minimal so don't be surprised if some skins of this type won't display the time. There's also a way to resize the Ghrone skins. And yeah, the tooltip needs work. Everything else I've put on the todo list.

Crae, the middle clicking problem you ran into was indeed a bug (really, lazy coding). And the Apply button should now work as intended.

Carl, the themeing I was referring to is also called visual styles, which is only XP or above. Anyway, the code in suspect should now only get executed on XP, so hopefully that will allow you to preview/select skins. I'd appreciate it if you or Serenity could try it out again on Win2K when you have the time.

Doreen, how about a standard balloon tooltip popup from the systray icon as a first go? That's already in the code so I would just have to add the capability to set the text. Later I could add support for Lompster-style balloon text skins to get your customized images popped up. Would that do? And thanks for the offer to make some defaults. Multiple alarms is easy enough to do except for the UI, which will require some time to get done "correctly."

PK, I added tooltip translucency with a hack. It's not supported natively so I don't know whether I can have non-flickering translucent, tracking tooltips. For now, changing the ini's [Tooltip]BackTrans setting will stop the flickering by disabling the translucency.

I think that covers everyone's issues or questions?

As an aside, last week I sent an email to the creator of SysMetrix to see if he was okay with my use of his skin format in this app. But he's yet to respond, so now I'm wondering if I should pull support or leave it in until he complains. Any thoughts?

Thanks again.

The SysMetrix guy seems to be one of the nice guys and since your program is also Freeware I doubt he seriously will complain if he sees it prior to getting to your e-mail?

And yes a standard balloon popup from systray sounds good for a start of course, but it will be neat to be able to skin our own pop up reminders in a future build when your time permits (and when you get really tired of me nagging you to death about this) =)

Nice to see you around again and don't code and drive it's the #1 killer!

Thanks for the update, it looks... almost the same (but thats what else to expect with a skinnable app....) ;-) Did you update the anti-aliasing of the clock hands?

As Doreen said, the Sysmetrix guy is friendly. Lets hope he doesnt have problems with this. Maybe you should include a small disclaimer about the skins though (this being a test-version or so), im not sure if all the authers like you distributing their skins.

I get the same error as before on exit

Sorry it didn't work Carl. Thanks for trying it out.

I've pulled the zips so no no more worries about "distributing" anything.

To all of you who actually took the time to do some testing and to report back on issues, thank you very, very much. Hopefully I'll be able to make it available again to you some day. For now I'll just wait until I hear back from the other devs.

bugger!

Sorry I took a few days to reply Red, been busy again

I managed to get the new version, had a few issues starting it up. One was stupid user error, I'd moved the program from my desktop into program files - did this as this app is a keeper! When I started it up again it wouldn't show, and put an entry in the log file saying it couldn't find the skins folder. A few quick edits of the ini file and I was off and racing.

Next problem, when I swapped to the skins tab it just hung fungusClock. I tried a few times, no idea what the problem was. I ended up replacing the ini file completely with the standard one from the original download, off and racing again. I've got the borked ini file saved, let me know if you want a copy.

Loving that lumen skin! Thanks a zillion for adding support for rainy skins! Scaling doesn't appear to work with them, but I'll crank open photoshop later on and shrink the png's myself.

Putting the current time into the tooltip might be handy. The lumen skin doesn't actually have the time anywhere (very odd). I've got daves quicksearch deskbar running and it shows the time, so its not such a huge concern though.

I'll be running fungusClock for a long time to come yet. Very very nice little app. The chimes are the best thing since sliced bread. Good job red!

"I've pulled the zips so no no more worries about "distributing" anything. To all of you who actually took the time to do some testing and to report back on issues, thank you very, very much." huh, am I missing something? Thank us? We just enjoyed your app. you took the time to code it; thank you very, very much :-)

I second that thank you

Hey all.

I'm back for a few days so I thought I'd upload a new version of the app, which can now be found at http://www.geocities.com/redllar/BetaTesting/

I've received OKs from Xymantix, rainy, and garoo; still waiting on the others. The zip now only has one skin in it, a very simple SysMetrix skin I created, so for now I think it's okay to distribute. If not, just let me know and I'll pull it.

I think and hope I finally got the properties dialog box crashing sorted this go around, as well as a few more bug fixes and stuff. Nothing major though. I did rework the online/offline check so that may not work for you anymore. Please let me know if it doesn't.

Anyone willing to try again on 2K, and possibly 98SE or ME?

Thanks for the kudos guys.

Dan, yes, please send me the borked ini. Also, I plan on making the skin resizing available to all skin types soon as well as making the tooltip much more configurable.

PK, I forgot to answer this before, but yes, the non-image-based analog clock hands are now alpha-blended and anti-aliased if you have GDI+ handy. They're not quite right but better than before. The image-based analog clock hands should already have been alpha-blended if the image file(s) had an alpha channel. Just let me know if there's a particular skin that you think isn't being drawn correctly.

Carl, I made up a new Neferchichi-based card deck for YaZZle 3.0. Would you want to test it out under Wine? 3.0 is slow as heck since I lost all of my optimized drawing code with the crash, but if you have a 1.5 processor or above it should be okay.

YaZZle 3.0? The last version I have is 2.0. Looking forward to seeing the changes you've made.
fungusClock is running without problem in 2K but will not start in 98SE

Thanks for the tests Carl.

I've uploaded a new version that will hopefully fix the 98 problem, assuming it actually ran but just didn't display anything.

If you get the "Unsupported version of Windows" popup then no version will work on 98 for you yet due to the graphic apis shortcomings. The log file would contain something like what's below:

App::Main - fungusClock Beta 2.2 starting up
App::Main - running under MS Windows 98
Bitmap::Init - using the built-in CxImage library
Bitmap::HasAlphaBltAPI - didn't find AlphaBlend api
Bitmap::HasTransBltAPI - didn't find TransparentBlt api
App::Main - unsupported version of Windows
fungusClock Beta 2.2 will now exit

This new version also supports multiple alarms plus a popup for each alarm that will be displayed as a balloon tip from the tray icon. I forgot to add in a check to see if your Windows setup has balloon tip support as well as a check to see if you have the tray icon enabled, so you might not get the popup.

Wanted to say "Thank you" for adding the multiple alarms and pop up notifier from taskbar! I've got no problems running it on XP so far. (btw that second hand sweep is very smooth!)

I have PCLinuxOS 9.1 now and YaZZle will not run under wine.

Your welcome Doreen, and thank you in return.

Carl, thanks for trying. I'm off the road now so l'll try my own Linux distros as well.

For those still interested, I've uploaded another version of the clock with new features added and reworked/enhanced tooltip. See the help docs for details. If you want to keep your old ini you'll have to edit it first and get rid of the "Skin" prefix in all of the [Skin] settings, otherwise this version will just quit.

I'm going to take this version to other sites now to see if I can get some more testing done before I release it publically, but I just wanted to say thanks again to all of you who helped with the testing.

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