pixelbreaker » Screensaver

PolarClock3 for Snow Leopard

pixelbreaker — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:58:33 +0000

I’ve had some time this morning to wrap the screensaver up in something other than screentime, and it all works perfectly for me. My first delve into Cocoa. Thanks Si Heys for the code I needed for this.

Please have a go and let me know if it works ok on Snow Leopard, and also older OSes, if there’s problems, comment here, and I’ll try and rectify any issues.

You can download it here.

Polar Clock plans

pixelbreaker — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:42:17 +0000

I’ve had countless requests to update PolarClock for OS X, as it’s not working on Snow Leopard at all.

I’m going to ditch screentime for flash, and work with some open source code from my friend Simon Heys, hopefully this will be much more reliable than screentime, which I’ve had nothing but trouble with and it’s really expensive for a screensaver that I want to offer for free.

For the PC versions, I’ll be using InstantStorm, or something similar.

Wired article

pixelbreaker — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 09:08:29 +0000

Wired got in touch a while ago asking about the PolarClock, and I’ve finally seen the finished article, it looks great!

pic after the jump…

iPhone PolarClock released

pixelbreaker — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:23:19 +0000

Ed Kauffmann over at RayFlex has been busy developing the iPhone release of the PolarClock. It’s now ready and released at version 1.0. If you buy this application you will get free upgrades to future versions. Money raised from the sales of the iPhone version will go towards further development of both the iPhone and Mac/PC versions of the PolarClock.

It has a few new features, my favourite being the moon phase at the centre of the concentric rings. Good work ed.

You can get a copy here:

Crazy popularity!

pixelbreaker — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:18:38 +0000

I’ve been contacted a few times recently for info about the Polar Clock screensaver. It’s been hugely successful, far beyond my imagination. To date, it has been downloaded 295,676 times. This blog has has over 3,500,000 unique visitors in the last 2 years! That’s amazing!

There’s an article in Computerbild (Germany) and Wired US is doing a feature on it this month (link soon).

PolarClock on OS X Leopard

pixelbreaker — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:13:24 +0000

I’ve found a bug in screentime, the software used to pack up PolarClock as a screensaver. When run on Leopard, after the screensaver exits back to the desktop, the Function keys and any shortcuts to the Dashboard or exposé don’t work. I have contacted screentime about this issue, and will post a fix a.s.a.p

PolarClock 3.0 Release

pixelbreaker — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:21:45 +0000

It’s all done!

Re-worked from the ground up in ActionScript 3, this release should be much less CPU intensive, and has had heaps of new features added. Read all about it at it’s new permanent home.

PolarClock Home

Polar Clock 3.0 development

pixelbreaker — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 21:09:45 +0000

Just an update of how the development of the next release of the clock is going.

I’ve ported 90% of the engine to actionscript 3.0 now, and begun implementation of a config panel built using Flex Builder 3 (Moxie). I’ve now got the following language implemented: English, Afrikaans, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portugese, Portugese (Brazil), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Slovakian, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese.

I have spoken to a guy at ScreenTime (who make screentime for flash) and they are sending me an updated version for windows in a couple of days, to match up the sizes of the config panels with the latest release for mac. Yeah, I bought screentime for mac + windows!!!

I’m hoping to launch version 3 of the clock on of before 21/07/07. Keep checking for updates!

So far there have been over 40,000 downloads of v1 and 2, it’s much much more popular than I ever expected!