Dali Clock


Dali Clock is a digital clock. When a digit changes, it "melts" into its new shape. The date is displayed when the mouse is pressed. The window can be made transparent, and can do funky psychedelic color cycling.

It is available for X11, MacOS X, Palm WebOS, and PalmOS Classic.
There is no Windows version, so don't ask.

Download the program:
MacOS X: DaliClock-227.dmg (607K)
This program requires MacOS 10.4.0 ("Tiger") or newer (PPC or Intel). There are three variants included here: a normal application; a screen saver; and a Dashboard widget.
Palm WebOS: DaliClock-227.ipk (37K)

Since Palm isn't yet letting people upload things to the App Catalog, here's how you install this:

  1. Email yourself a link to the .ipk file. Don't mail the file itself as an attachment: copy the .ipk link above and send yourself an email with just the URL in it. You can do that by clicking here.

  2. Open that mail message on your Pre, and click the link.

  3. That will appear to have done nothing, but it did! Go to the first page of the Launcher, and you'll see that the new application has been installed.
PalmOS Classic: DaliClock-227.prc (32K)
Transfer this to your PDA or phone, and go.
Unix, Linux, etc: Your vendor probably provides a binary distribution for your platform. If not, compile it from the source code below.

Download the source code:
All Platforms: xdaliclock-2.27.tar.gz (1MB)
This contains the source code for all four platforms: there are subdirectories for each (X11, OSX, Palm, WebOS). For X11, run "configure" and "make". For OSX, an XCode 2.4 project file is included ("make" will run XCode). To compile the PalmOS Classic version, you'll need a cross-compiler; see the README.

History:
This is a very old program! The original version was written some time in the early 1980s by Steve Capps for the Xerox Alto workstation. In 1984, he ported it to the original Macintosh 128K.

In 1991, I (Jamie Zawinski) re-implemented it from scratch for X Windows on Unix. It's been fairly popular there ever since.

In 1999, I ported the X11 version to PalmOS. The entertaining thing about this is that the Palm Pilot that I had at the time was an only slightly more powerful machine than the Mac 128K: they had almost the same CPU, and almost the same sized screen! The Palm was about 4x faster, though, and had 16x as much memory. And it weighed a whole lot less.

In 2005, I ported the X11 version to MacOS X, bringing this story full circle.

And most recently, in 2009, I ported it to Palm WebOS.

Dali Clock Family Reunion:


(Not pictured: Palm Pre running WebOS 1.0.3.)


© 1991-2009 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
``First time surrealists are often confused by the similarities between fish and telephones.''