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PAX countdown vista gadget?

BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
edited July 2008 in PAX Archive
I know theres a mac version... anybody care to make one for vista? ;-)

Ninja Edit!
Whoever does (or if there are multiple good entries) I can hook said person(s) up with some xbox360 things (a game or accessories) or a windows game.
Mostly cause I want one for all the vista PCs I have :D (I know there are others)

Non-ninja Edit!
This is for a *good* vista gadget, not a half-assed one. ;-)

<MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
BigRed on
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Posts

  • mentok1982mentok1982 I could never leave you PAX baby. BaltimoreRegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    I can make room for this on my sidebar. I'll lose my weather gadget if I must.

    mentok1982 on
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  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    BigRed wrote: »
    I know theres a mac version... anybody care to make one for vista? ;-)

    Ninja Edit!
    Whoever does (or if there are multiple good entries) I can hook said person(s) up with some xbox360 things (a game or accessories) or a windows game.
    Mostly cause I want one for all the vista PCs I have :D (I know there are others)

    Non-ninja Edit!
    This is for a *good* vista gadget, not a half-assed one. ;-)

    What would you want to see in it? Just a countdown timer, or like a countdown timer and links to resources etc...?

    Can you give a feature set of what you'd like to see in it ideally?

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • ElectricTurtleElectricTurtle Seeress WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    I think that this would both damage my fragile sanity watching and waiting as well as rape my system resources like Sidebar always does.

    ElectricTurtle on
    yfrxgugaj8wu.png
  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    BigRed wrote: »
    I know theres a mac version... anybody care to make one for vista? ;-)

    Ninja Edit!
    Whoever does (or if there are multiple good entries) I can hook said person(s) up with some xbox360 things (a game or accessories) or a windows game.
    Mostly cause I want one for all the vista PCs I have :D (I know there are others)

    Non-ninja Edit!
    This is for a *good* vista gadget, not a half-assed one. ;-)

    What would you want to see in it? Just a countdown timer, or like a countdown timer and links to resources etc...?

    Can you give a feature set of what you'd like to see in it ideally?

    Countdown
    Link to Pax forums
    Link to Pax site

    Links possibly in the form of buttons at the top? Or when you hover the mouse over the pax symbol/countdown it fades out and the links fade in? (kinda like with the woot gadget) I dunno, be creative with that.

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    I think that this would both damage my fragile sanity watching and waiting as well as rape my system resources like Sidebar always does.

    Get moar ram :P

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Hmm... I'll see what I can do once we come to some sort of satisfactory plan for a certain problem happening over in the Advice forum.

    EDIT: Okay, I'm working on it now to get my mind off of some topics in another thread that seem to have brought up some old uncomfortable feelings.

    Thing is, I don't actually own Vista... so I'm learning how to make the Widget right now, and it seems straightforward enough... but you guys'll have to test it for me. =(

    EDIT 2: Hmm... this is difficult to do when upset about something, and even more difficult to do when you can't test examples due to not having the operating system. =(

    Would you guys be opposed to me doing it in a different "sidebar" environment instead? Like Google Desktop for example? You can run it in Windows.

    Let me know if you REALLY want it in Vista's sidebar. Maybe I can distract myself this weekend by convincing my boss to give me one of his Vista licenses and installing it on my machine to try this out. As it is, if I don't either install Vista somehow or do it in an alternative like Google Desktop it doesn't seem likely that I'll make something that looks good: I just can't see what I'm doing, and if what I'm doing looks right at all. (Why the hell is the sidebar API for HTML and Javascript anyways? I thought they made their pretty little .NET Framework to be able to do stuff like this... and at least I'd have a WYSIWYG window editor and likely project file support (or even an emulator) if it was able to be made through Visual Studio and the .NET framework. But I digress.)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Okay, it's apparently going to be slow... REAL slow... on my computer, but apparently you can get a "test ISO" of Vista that you can use through Virtual PC for just these situations.

    I'll download it tonight and continue progress. I still think it's a shame that after all those years developing the .NET framework so they'd have an easy way to make fun things like this, they STILL chose to require it to be developed in a way that basically amounts to hacked-and-slashed HTML and Javascript to make these gadgets.

    EDIT: Ahh, the benefits of being a Microsoft Certified Developer shop. (Snags free Vista license before running home)

    EDIT 2: Apparently my system is made of epic fail. I only have 512mb of RAM on my home system, which prevents me from installing Vista through Virtual PC (as VPC will only let me use ~400mb or so of RAM due to other resources in use and it won't let me install without 512mb).

    I'll be getting my next paycheck on the first of the month... if no one's already made something before then, I'll go get some more RAM (I need it anyways, might as well use this as an excuse) and make the darn thing. =)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Yes it has to be vista gadget... otherwise I would have asked for another sidebar ;)

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    te he, true =)

    I'll see what I can do once I get enough RAM in this machine for it to let me install Vista. Apparently if I make the Widget correctly, I can view it in a web browser (at least, parts of it)... but I won't be able to see if the actual code part of it is working correctly. At best, I'll be able to see if the colors I wanted are coming in right.

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    After a mishap with new memory voltage (apparently my crappy ECS motherboard doesn't allow the voltage to be changed from 1.8v for RAM, but I bought 2.0v RAM earlier today), I've got enough RAM to do the job and I'm installing Vista on VirtualPC as we speak. =)

    Hopefully this will result in fruitful developments. =)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    So, Javascript is a pain in the butt... I hate weakly typed languages. HATE them.

    Anyways, an early beta is on the way... I'm doing some testing on it right now to make sure it's working as I had intended it to. (Thank goodness for Virtualization... I'd never finish this thing if I couldn't actually test it =) )

    My goals right now are as follows:

    * (done, testing as we speak) Get the algorithm working correctly for the countdown
    * Allow you to set the "scope" of the countdown (for those who don't want to see the per-second ticking because it drives them BONKERS... I know it does for me. You'll be able to set that you want to see the countdown in months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds... but if you choose seconds, for example, it'll show you "X Months, Y Days, Z Hours, A Minutes, B Seconds" and not just "X Seconds"... if that makes any sense. You'll see what I mean when I put it up, I'm trying to make it pretty smart about how it should display =) )
    * Allow you to set the "PAX date" (so you can use it in future years... by default, it'll be set to this year)
    * Links to the PAX website and the PAX forum
    * User-defined links (in case you need to get to something else quickly, like the CCST's website etc...)
    * Efficiency (I want to try to get it to eat as few CPU cycles as possible... this early beta's definitely heavy on the cycles, but I think I've built it so that with some changes I can bypass most of the nonessential processing and prevent system slowdown as a result)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Sweet :D

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Okay, I had NO idea where to go to host it... so I put it on an upload service called 4shared.com. I picked the first one I saw when I did a search on Google for "file hosting" that looked like it was free...

    so double-check the file first before you use it. There should only be PNG, XML, CSS, JS and HTML files in there. If there's anything else, it could be that this 4shared.com site is adding stuff to the download and I'll need to find another site to host on.

    Anyone know of a good free place to host files for download anyways?

    Anyways, here's the very EARLY alpha:

    EDIT: Now version 1.0!
    http://edgarverona.googlepages.com/paxbar.gadget


    The algorithm seems to work well... but visually it leaves a lot to be desired at the moment, and most of the special features I want to implement haven't been implemented yet. I just want to make sure this'll work on others' systems for this first test.

    Now, I need to go through and pretty it up/add the features I wanted to add in... but let me know what you think so far.

    EDIT: Next version coming out should be significantly compacted compared to this one... I had to get used to the way it was treating my CSS. =)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Ack... I didn't realize how late it was... time flies when you're having fun. =)

    Anyways, the latest download is here (Technically Alpha 1.1, but I forgot to change the version number... it's late =) ):

    EDIT: Now at version 1.0: http://edgarverona.googlepages.com/paxbar.gadget


    This one has the following implemented:

    X Get the algorithm working correctly for the countdown
    X Links to the PAX website and the PAX forum
    X Efficiency (It's about as efficient as I'm going to get it now, unless I think of something else)


    The following still need to be implemented, but I'll do it tomorrow:

    * Allow you to set the "scope" of the countdown
    * Allow you to set the "PAX date"
    * User-defined links

    In addition, I need input as to how the thing should look. Do you want it snazzier? How so if you do? Let me know. =)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • de4dmeta1de4dmeta1 Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Now, when setting the 'scope' of the countdown, would it be possible to have an option to list only days? Like, for example, '2xx days remaining'? Or is that just me being an inordinate jackass requesting unreasonable things? :P

    de4dmeta1 on
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Oh, like if it's 3 months away, you'd want it to show "90 days"?

    Hmm... I could try... at the moment, here's the breakdown of "scope" options....

    You'll be able to choose from Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute, or Second granularity. Each level going down will have the levels above it shown. So for example:

    Year: "0 Years remaining" (I think I disabled this at the moment, realizing that it'll never be more than a year away)
    Month: "7 Months remaining"
    Day: "7 Months, 1 Day remaining"
    Hour: "7 Months, 1 Day, 22 Hours Remaining"
    Minute: "7 Months, 1 Day, 22:40 Remaining"
    Second: "7 Months, 1 Day, 22:40:22 Remaining"

    Still working out the details of how I'll do it though (I need to change around how "contstants" are being displayed, such as the actual words "Months", "Days", or the colons between hour/minute/second) to make it happen, but I'll be doing that today. I think I could include just an "XXX Days" option if desired. I'll need to calculate everything differently than I am at the moment though, which is fine. =)

    Would you want like "XXX Days, HH:MM:SS Remaining" capability as well? I guess what the difference between "XXX Days" and "X Months, Y Days" would be is that the granularity level hasn't changed (so maybe I could allow for finer granularity to be chosen still), but you're changing what you want the Month/Day appearance to be. Perhaps that could be a checkbox that says something like "Show Total Days instead of Months" in the settings page.

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • whypick1whypick1 PAX [E] Info Booth Manager ~2' from an LCDRegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Re: File sharing - Try RapidShare or MegaUpload.

    whypick1 on
    Is it PAX <insert nearest future PAX here> yet?
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    whypick1 wrote: »
    Re: File sharing - Try RapidShare or MegaUpload.

    Cool, thanks! I'll throw the next one on rapidshare.com, looks easier to navigate through.

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Okay, Beta 1.0 is ready!

    http://rapidshare.com/files/87196502/paxbar.gadget.html

    New Features:

    * Settings screen is now functioning
    * PAX Date can be set to pretty much any date... I guess you could use it as a generic countdown gadget now... but with PAX links. =) Anyways, it's hard wired to start with this PAX, but you can change it for the next PAX etc...
    * Setting the "Scope" now can be done through settings. Remember that with each progressively higher "scope" level, there are less system resources consumed... but it becomes more and more of an estimate instead of an exact figure. So if you set it to just show how many approximate months away PAX is, it won't update frequently at all... but it'll be a rough approximation. If you go down to seconds or minutes, it'll be updating every second (still a small footprint, but more than the higher levels), but it'll be as exact of a number as can be given.
    * Links to PAX and the PAX Forums work now and have been "prettied up" a little.
    * Through the settings, you can toggle "Show Raw Date" on and off. This will give you the years, months, and days until PAX in just days (instead of X Years, Y Months, Z days).
    * Changed the algorithm so that certain "won't change in a while" values (like days, months, and years until PAX) won't get updated on every run of the update method. Though this speeds up the gadget considerably, it has some negative consequences, however: see below.

    Bug Fixes:

    * I believe I've fixed the algorithm for the days portion of the countdown... it wasn't working correctly, and I didn't notice until I was able to change the PAX time easily. Anyways, it's working now as far as I can tell.
    * Some graphical glitches have been fixed. Let me know if there's any more.

    What I need you to do

    * Try different dates on your system AND as the PAX date, to see if you get any wild miscalculations or "NaN " (Not a Number) errors. Let me know if you see any.
    * Let me know if you'd like anything changed visually... if you can provide a background image for the gadget, for example, toss it my way! I'm no good at art. Also, if you think it should be a different font, post it here. I guess you can always change the stylesheet if you want, but still...
    *

    What has been removed

    * "Your Links" - I found out that there's some severe restrictions on what you can save for Gadgets, so being able to define your own links just wouldn't work very well. I don't know if anyone would need anything like that anyways. =)

    Remaining Bugs

    * I need to remove the actual "Your Links" placeholder link... I jumped the gun and posted it before I did that. Should be fixed tomorrow.
    * Above I spoke of "negative consequences" for one of my efficiency improvements. This is it. =) If you change the system time, you will need to open up the Settings for the Gadget and press "Ok" (no need to actually change settings) for the gadget to re-synchronize with your system time. My attempts to lessen the amount of processor cycles the gadget takes up came at the expense of this minor inconvenience.
    * The "hour", "day", and "month" labels were sitting flush up against their numbers instead of having some space. I just fixed this, so it'll be in the next release.

    Anyways, hope you guys like it! If you have a better place to host it, as always... go for it. I don't have the cash for a proper web host right now. =(

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • Amber FechkoAmber Fechko Registered User regular
    edited January 2008

    This is awesome!

    Thank you. :)

    Amber Fechko on
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Cool, you like it? Awesome!

    Let me know if you find any bugs... it's still early, so there may be some strange stuff I'll have to figure out... I'm still not 100% sure that the countdown algorithms are correct, but so far they seem like it... so if you get time, try to get it to give you an obviously invalid/incorrect countdown statement for some time combination.

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    an idea for a future version.
    Is it possible to have the pax logo as the background?

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • Moe FwackyMoe Fwacky Right Here, Right Now Drives a BuickModerator mod
    edited January 2008
    pax_logo.jpg
    In case you didn't know where to find it

    Moe Fwacky on
    E6LkoFK.png

  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Oh, yeah, I can do it... but with the colors, it might interfere with the visibility of the text. I used that same logo (shrunk, of course) for the rest of the app. =)

    I'll see what I can do. with the white/blue along with the black background, it might be hard to find a single color to do it with... but I don't know much about all of that color theory/graphic design theory. Any suggestions for something that might work?

    EDIT: I'll add it to the list... would it be un-kosher to change the black background color to something lighter (so that I could use a dark foreground text for the actual gadget itself)? If it was white, or a light blue, it'd make finding a font that'd work easier.

    Or maybe if I/someone turned it into a faded version of itself (like you could still see the logo, but it's just a faint ghost in the background or something?). I'll have to look into it.

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Okay... so in an attempt not to make the background render the actual text unreadable, I've made a couple of test PAX logo modifications... What do you think of these?

    (EDIT: Didn't want to see these anymore, so I spoiler'd them)

    faded.png
    Faded, and I'd use a dark color font for the foreground

    emboss.png
    Embossed, and a lighter font color for the foreground

    I personally like the faded one the best, because it doesn't actually modify how the image looks... just forces it to be more like a background image (the PAX logo is something that seems to demand to be in the foreground =) ).


    EDIT: Also, with the shape of the PAX logo, we're either going to have to increase the size of the Gadget (is that desirable?), or chop off part of the logo... or it'll be really small. I'll try to get some comparison pics up if possible.

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Okay, here's what the following look like (from top to bottom, none of them with the obvious corrected font colors that'd be needed for you to actually SEE what the foreground says):

    1) Faded PAX logo... didn't work as well as I imagined it would.
    2) Embossed PAX logo... meh.
    3) PAX Logo w/black background. Looks good, but it'd be VERY hard to find a font that'd be visible on top of that logo.
    4) PAX Logo w/blue background. Doesn't do much to help... maybe if it was transparent (I'll try that next)
    5) Full-size PAX Logo (lol... I tried this first, forgetting that CSS doesn't auto-resize background images... in truth though, I kind of think it looks the coolest of the bunch so far. It's like it gives a subtle hint of the PAX logo... people who know of PAX would (possibly) immediately recognize it... people who didn't know of PAX would have no idea what it was. =) so, anyways, I kept it here for your perusal. )
    examples.png

    The other alternative not shown here is to make the gadget bigger... (do you really want it to be bigger? 'cause we can make it bigger, but I don't know if it'd be frustrating having a gigantic countdown).

    EDIT: Here's some more... I realized that I could make the gray bar at the top transparent to help with the image... the images look better as a result, but as you can see it's VERY hard to find a font color that'll work with the snazzy PAX logo as the background for it.
    examples2.png

    (Also added spoiler tags, to keep this thing from getting too long =) )

    I also tried doing something where I turned the PAX logo into just a flat, gray representation of itself (thus much easier to put a color over)... and I tried some more of that faded version, but it still looks bad. Anyways, the flat version of the PAX logo looks good in my opinion:
    examples3.png

    Anyways... if someone can, throw ideas my way... maybe tomorrow, I think I'm going to get some sleep tonight. But throw some ideas up here for what might work. I can check them almost instantaneously:
    dev.png

    I've got a little "Gadget-making dev environment" going... a push of that PAXBuild deletes the old PAXbar.gadget, builds a new one, and then I just have to alt+tab over to the virtual PC window and double-click the .gadget file to see the latest attempt in action. After a much longer weekend than I thought it'd be working on this, I've got it down to a science. =) I kind of like making these things now. =)

    In honesty, I thought I was going to have this done by midday saturday... turned out to be a larger project than I was expecting, partly because I wasn't ready for the pain that Javascript was going to put me through. So I've never programmed much with Javascript, and I honestly thought it was a weakly typed language. Spent most of the day Saturday trying to figure out why the code wouldn't work and was giving cryptic errors... turned out because I thought it was weakly typed, I wasn't paying close attention to the casing of the methods. Yeah, that was fun to find out. ;) )

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    As long as relevant info is in the gadget (i think this qualifies) i dont mind the gadget being a bit bigger. Right now the pax gadget is the smallest one in my bar (largest being weatherbug)

    the very first one in your list might work. Try fading it a little more (the smaller the faded picture gets the less faded it looks) and maybe bolding the yellow text to increase visibility

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    BigRed wrote: »
    As long as relevant info is in the gadget (i think this qualifies) i dont mind the gadget being a bit bigger. Right now the pax gadget is the smallest one in my bar (largest being weatherbug)

    the very first one in your list might work. Try fading it a little more (the smaller the faded picture gets the less faded it looks) and maybe bolding the yellow text to increase visibility

    Check out the ones in the next two lists I just put up (I've been editing the post above, adding new ones as I thought of ideas). I also tried some more faded ones, but they just don't look right to me... I think the "PA" in PAX comes out looking too bright. =( I think you might like some of the new ones though... I particularly like the flat gray ones that were coming out on the third set, and the first one of the second set personally.

    EDIT: Also... we could stand to have it larger I suppose... but I'm not sure there's even enough content in it (there's a lot going on under the surface, but in the end-result what you see on the screen there's not too much) for it to be worth taking up too much real estate... but that could just be me. I could try some where it's larger. We'll still have the font problem though. =(

    EDIT 2: I'll have to get back to this after work... fell asleep last night, and now I've got to go earn that daily bread. =) Be back in a minute... post if you find any problems with the gadget! Thanks! =)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Still at work, but just checking up... did anyone find any bugs or anything yet? =) Has anyone given more thought to the set of backgrounds/foregrounds listed above? Let me know =) Maybe I'll make it so you can choose... don't know how easy/hard that'll be though, I'll need to look into it. =)

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • kaldoniskaldonis Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Just a thought... why not have the color scheme similar to the OS X widget? It looks pretty good.

    widget.jpg

    kaldonis on
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    kaldonis wrote: »
    Just a thought... why not have the color scheme similar to the OS X widget? It looks pretty good.

    widget.jpg

    Oh! I hadn't actually *seen* the OSX widget before =)

    Yeah, they have a slick "faded" thing going on. I was trying to get the Penny Arcade orange/blue/gray thing going...

    Where can you get that widget? I'd like to steal the background image from it... if that's the image everyone wants to use for the Vista widget, that is.

    Heh, I was just starting to set it up so that you could choose your own color schemes/background images... it was going to be a lot of work, but I figured it'd help us find the right combination (or let someone do their own thing with it =) ) It probably would've taken another week or so to do though, given the non-weekend free time I have, and how much I suck at Javascript. =)

    EDIT: Aha! Just noticed, the image was on the same site that you can download it at. (aaannnd... yoink =) )

    Okay, so I must know from Vista-using PAers... do you want the OSX background image to be the one we use?

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    maybe not the exact controller shape (to prevent a direct ripoff :P) but the blue background with faded logo and the white text would be fine

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    BigRed wrote: »
    maybe not the exact controller shape (to prevent a direct ripoff :P) but the blue background with faded logo and the white text would be fine

    Coolness. I'll see what I can do with it. =) Whatever he did to fade the PAX logo, it turned out a LOT better than what I did. I'll have to see if I can acquire it for Vista purposes. =)

    Heh, it's funny how no two programmers think alike... the guy who did the OSX widget did the countdown in an entirely different way than I did. As a result, he got to ignore some of the annoying things like calculating the months/years in the countdown, which made his code a lot easier to handle.

    He also assumes that setTimeout will fire at the exact moment it's told, but because it's a low priority event it's almost never exactly on the mark... which means it'll run a lot faster (because he doesn't have to recalculate using the actual date), but it'll get inaccurate over time as well. But it's probably a good assumption, because most people turn off their computers at the end of the day so it'd just reset and the minor inaccuracy would be completely unnoticed.

    I think it's interesting to see the different techniques that different programmers use. Ooh, he also generates the call to setTimeout dynamically, which is neat. I didn't know you can do that in Javascript. Fun! I'll have to remember that. Cool!

    I'm going to temporarily comment out the stuff I was doing for customization earlier tonight, so I can get a working "version 1.0" out. That is, if the algorithms seem to be working fine. Is it working okay so far? I haven't gotten much response to if it's actually working as intended. =)

    VThornheart on
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  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Ahh... it is SO much better with that background. Whoever did that version of the logo has awesome photoshop skills... well, at least much better than my Paint.NET skills. =)

    I'll be posting the new one up momentarily.

    VThornheart on
    3DS Friend Code: 1950-8938-9095
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Okay, Version 1.0 is up! And now no more ads... I had forgotten that you can get free web hosting from Google, so I did that instead. =)

    http://edgarverona.googlepages.com/paxbar.gadget

    Since I didn't hear anyone saying that there were bugs, I'm assuming that it works well... I'll release some further versions if there's more that people want/need, but for now it should be good... hopefully. =)

    Screenshots of the v1.0 Vista PAXBar, in its many modes =):

    example_v1.png

    EDIT: Oh, just realized... it says "0 day" instead of "0 days". I'll fix that. =)

    EDIT 2: Okay, fixed. Same link, version 1.1 now. It was a problem for all of the named constants (days, months, etc...). All fixed up. ;)

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  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    link is 404

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • MonoxideMonoxide Registered User, ClubPA regular
    edited January 2008
    It works for me. Give it another shot?

    Monoxide on
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    BigRed wrote: »
    link is 404

    You may have hit it in the minute or so downtime between me deleting the version 1.0 of the file and uploading the version 1.1 of the file. =) Try it again. Let me know if there's anything you guys want added!

    I tried to make it a good mix for those who said they wanted one that wasn't resource intensive/didn't show the detailed time, and those who wanted a more "hardcore countdown", showing the seconds and such (which is slightly more resource intensive... but still not too bad. Was getting about 1% CPU usage when it refreshed on my Vista Virtual Machine, so I imagine it'd be even less for someone running Vista natively).

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  • BigRedBigRed Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited January 2008
    Looks good :)

    I think the accuracy doesnt really matter, as long as its down to the day/hour :P

    BigRed on
    <MoeFwacky> besides, BigRed-Worky is right
  • VThornheartVThornheart Registered User regular
    edited January 2008
    BigRed wrote: »
    Looks good :)

    I think the accuracy doesnt really matter, as long as its down to the day/hour :P

    I agree totally, in retrospect... it's just interesting how two different programmers can think about (and solve) a problem in two very different ways.

    He recognized the reasons why accuracy wasn't terribly important, and build a simple yet effective widget as a result.

    I obsessed over accuracy, and ended up making a much more complex widget under the surface in an attempt to get the accuracy without using up too many processing cycles.

    I guess as a positive side effect of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, we Vista users have some extra goodies and options. =)

    EDIT: Hmm... looking at his code some more, I *really* like what he did with using modulus and the ticks since 1970 to avoid having to do all of the checks I had to do. Ooh, and he was using regular expressions... nice! Didn't know you could do that in Javascript. Much, much simpler. Must I always code the hard way? =)

    Anyways, as always let me know if something goes awry so I can fix it. =)

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