The "x" denotes minor bug fixes, or changes that do not change the feature set of the program. The full version can be found by using the "Get Info" command while in the Finder.
A special note to registered users:
I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank all of you who have supported this program by sending in the registration fee. This version would not have been possible without you. This upgrade is free to registered users - if you have already paid, disregard the shareware notice. Thanks friends!
I would like to send a special word of thanks to those users outside the US who have registered. I realize that the currency and language differences make registration from overseas especially cumbersome.
Name Change:
A legal conflict with v1.2 required that the name be changed. The software is now called "Time Palette".
New Version:
This is a major revision of the program. While I have tried to make it as bug-free as possible, some are sure to come up. If you discover a bug, please let me know so it can be fixed.
Shareware Notice:
With version 2.0, I have added many new features and fixed all bugs from previous versions known to me at this writing. Time Palette is shareware. If you continue to use this software, please do your part and send in the shareware fee. I have put a lot of time into this new version... a version that would not have happened without the support of registered users. I seriously considered making this version available only to registered users. Please do not abuse the shareware system. Thank you.
Requirements:
• A Macintosh computer (Plus or better)
• System 7.0 or greater
• 75K available memory (1200K for the best color map display)
• Color is strongly recommended for the map display, but not required.
What Time Palette Does:
Time Palette is an application to keep track of the time throughout the world. Information on 29 different cities can be stored. Daylight Savings is supported as are half & quarter hour time zones. Time Palette can also display a map of the world, depicting day and night based on the current date & time.
Using Time Palette:
Copy the Time Palette application to your hard drive. You may also choose to install it on your network server (assuming you have a site license), or run it from CD-ROM if that is how you obtained the program.
Upon opening, if a Preferences file is not present, you will be shown the preferences dialog box. You will want to set your local offset from GMT, and indicate if you are currently observing Daylight Savings Time. Once the program knows where you are located, it will open its two windows and a preferences file will be placed in your system folder.
Time Palette ships with 29 major cities in the database. The start & end of standard and daylight time were believed to be correct at the time this was written, but local politics and customs may change these dates. If you know of an error, please let me know.
Please note that the math involved in drawing the map is quite complex and it may be rather slow on older computers. You can speed it up by turning off the transparency option in the preferences dialog box or by using a lower quality map.
Note that this would go faster if the earth's orbit was simpler. Unfortunately I had to freeze the feature set at some point and the code to alter the earth's orbit was taken out. Some beta testers reported it didn't work too well and caused problems in the Southern Hemisphere and that the orbit of earth should be left alone.
Time Palette uses two windows, a map window and a "Time Palette" window. The Map Window shows the areas of day & night on a map of the world. The Time Palette window contains from 1 to 10 menus showing city names. To view the time in a city, select it from the menu.
Points of Interest:
• Double-clicking on the time display will allow you to set the background color for a city.
• Holding down the option key will flip the time to a date display.
• A "+" or "-" in front of the time display indicates tomorrow or yesterday respectively.
• Time Palette will beep if it can not open a window - try a smaller font or a lower quality map - or increase the program's memory size by choosing Get Info in the finder.
The Menus:
About Time Palette…
Choosing this item will display credits, copyright and shareware information.
PREFERENCES:
Display Font / Size:
Allows you to choose the typeface and type size for the time displays.
Display Seconds:
Toggles the time between hh:mm:ss to hh:mm.
Use Zone Names:
Toggles the appending of the time zone name, such as "PDT" or "EST".
Number of Clocks:
You may choose between 1 and 10 clocks, the width of the display is determined by the longest city name, given a font and size. Using the default cities, 10 clocks will fit nicely on a 21" (1152x870) display, using Geneva 9pt.
Transparent Map / Transparency Level:
Toggles solid / transparent night shading on the map. Specify the level of transparency in the range 0-65535. (0 = 0%, 65535 = 100%) Using transparent shading allows you to see the map shaded darker (but not solid black) and requires a lot of processor time. This option is only recommended for fast computers (fast 68030 systems or any 68040).
Map:
There are 4 choices: B&W, 16 Shades of Gray, 256 color & true color (16 bit color). This allows you to set the color depth of the map display. Whatever you set it to, the program will try to use. If your monitor is unable to display the number of colors you have chosen, it will be made to look as good as possible under those conditions.
For example - you may wish to set the map to gray scale which uses less memory than color. The table below describes the options.
Black and White - Uses about 40K of memory.
16 Grays - Uses about 115K of memory - Nice looking map for low memory situations
256 Colors - Uses about 575K of memory - Very nice looking map - shows ocean terrain.
True Color - Uses about 925K of memory - The very best map - performance of transparency option is increased.
Daylight Savings Time:
Check this box when your local time zone is on Daylight Savings, the program uses this information to calculate the time in other cities.
Your Location:
Enter your offset from Greenwich Mean Time in the format +/- 00:00 (ie +3:30, -11:00). The plus or minus sign is very important.
TIME ZONE CONFIGURATION:
Double click on a city in the list to bring up its settings. You can change the settings for a particular city and click on "Set City Info" to record your changes. To exit the dialog box while saving your changes, click on "Save & Exit".
Usually, pressing Return will exit a dialog box but I chose to force you to click on a button so you would not accidentally lose information. I am open to any comments on this decision.
Absolute vs Relative:
Some places start Daylight Savings on an Absolute Date (ex: Seoul, Korea - April 10), while others start on a relative date (Chicago, Illinois - First Sunday in April). Absolute dates are the same day every year - relative dates fall on different days each year.
DST Observed:
Check this box if the city observes Daylight Savings Time.
Std. / Daylight:
Enter the 3 letter time zone abbreviation for both Standard & Daylight Time, such as "PDT" or "EST".
+/- GMT:
Enter the selected city's offset from Greenwich Mean Time in the format +/- 00:00 (ie +3:30, -11:00). The plus or minus sign is very important.
About the Daylight Map:
The map used here is over 600 pixels wide. Therefore those of you with 9" black & white screens, Color Classics, and 12" monitors will not be able to see all of the map. This was a decision I made based on the size requirement of the program. I did not want to have to have 2 copies of the map at two different sizes as this would greatly increase the size of the program. The decision was also based on the fact that most small displays are on slow computers and open the map is very computation intensive.
There are 3 different maps. Black & White, 16 Shades of Gray, and a 256 color version. You can also choose to have 16 bit color. When drawing the night time shading, if it is transparent, more colors are "created" and using 256 colors or less results in loss of some color information. For this reason, certain levels of transparency work best in different depths.
For 256 colors the recommended transparency level is 42000. For the others it doesn't really matter as just about anything will look quite good.
The math involved here is quite complex. To refresh the map all at once would take far too much time. Therefore the map is slowly updated in the background over a period of 90 seconds. If you alter the system clock, it will take up to 3 minutes for the map to reflect the change. To force it to update, close it and open it again.
Because of the complex nature of the map calculations, some machines will be slow to open it. Once it is open and running in the background, the performance hit should minimal.
Some sample times to open the map:
Mac SE: 45 seconds in B&W, Quadra 800: 2 seconds in 256 colors with transparency on.
TIME DIFFERENTIAL:
This dialog box will allow you to find the time in one city, given the time in another city. Enter a Time and Date for the selected city. Select the 2nd city for which you'd like to find the time based on the first city, and press return.
ELAPSED TIME:
This dialog box will allow you to find the time between events in different cities. Enter the two times, and select the cities. Press return to calculate the elapsed time between the two events.
ALARMS:
Three alarms are available. Each may be set to go off at any time in any time zone. Check the box, to activate the alarm. Time Palette must be running in order for the alarm to go off. (It may be running in the background and does not need to have any windows open).Future Plans:
FUTURE PLANS:
Time Palette does have a future. I had to freeze the feature set at some point so there are a few ideas did not make it into this version but will probably appear before too long - at least for registered users (hint).
Some features I am thinking about implementing in the future are:
• Breaking the 29 city limit. While most users are content with 29 choices, it would be nice to have more. The current limit is based on a Mac Menu Manager limitation. There are ways around this limitation. By doing this I will need to use more memory so there are some trade-offs. I am interested in your comments.
• Cleaning up the time zone configuration dialog box. While 2.0 is a vast improvement over 1.x, I still feel it could be cleaner and have a nicer interface.
• Currently, Time Palette will continue to update and display on top of some screen savers. I am working on fixing this but it did not make it into this version.
• Support for calendars other than the Gregorian (Such as the Islamic Hegira, Persian etc.).
• Sunrise / Sunset & Moonrise / Moonset times.
• Indicators for holidays. Certain religious holidays are lunar-based and the dates can be difficult to calculate. Any comments would be appreciated.
• I am considering adding scrollbars and a resize box to the map window. This would allow it to work on smaller monitors.
• Opening the map is too slow. The map is over 600 pixels wide. (Each pixel is about 0.6 degrees). To calculate each pixel, the computer must do... 4 additions, 6 multiplies & 2 divides and well as 3 transcendental functions. Some of these calculations can be avoided. I am working on restructuring the code to make this more efficient while maintaining accuracy.
I am open to any ideas or suggestions - please let me know what you think.
Version 2.0:
CHANGES IN THIS VERSION:
• Changed creator code to "TP20"
• The program has been completely rewritten from the ground up. This has made it more modular and efficient as well as making it easier for me to add new features in the future.
• Fixed bug which caused menus to switch from Geneva 9 to System Font (12pt Chicago on US Systems). This happened after running programs such as MS Word & MacWrite II. The only solution was to restart the computer.
• If the General Control Panel (or certain other time displays) was open while Time Palette was running, the seconds display in Time Palette's clocks would be jumpy (the seconds could go [10..11..12..11..13..12..14..15] This has been corrected.
• Upon opening, the window will now attempt to position itself where you last left it. If the screen has been altered so that the last location is off the visible screen, it will default to just below the menu bar. It will now also recognize the enlarged menu bar created by such utilities as RadiusWare.
• Time Palette now allows you to set a background color for each city in the time display window.
• Increased the number of cities from 27 to 29.
• Holding down the option key will change the time display to a date display.
• Daylight Savings Time is handled completely automatically for cities other than your own (I don't try to set the clock for you, as this may confuse other software). The start & end dates for Daylight Savings can be in the form (April 10, May 29, etc.) or (First Sunday in April, Second Tuesday in May, etc.). The time of the change can also be set (2am in the USA). Some other programs just use midnight. Time Palette will tell you what time it really is.
• Support for System 7.1 "Date&Time" Control Panel. This allows for the optional use of a leading zero in time displays. Prior to this, the leading zero was always there.
• The offsets from GMT are now a single entry such as -3:00, instead of -3, -30 as they were before. Hopefully this will be more intuitive.
• Support for System 7 Balloon Help. This is used in the Preferences & Time Zone Configuration Dialogs.
• The program now creates a preferences file instead of saving the preferences within the application. This means it will now run from locked volumes such as a CD-ROM or network drive lacking write privileges. It also has multi-launch capability when run from a server. This also means that future versions of the software will be able to import and use the older preferences files.
• The number of clock displays can now be user-defined. You may now also choose the font and size for the clock display.
• A display showing a map of the world depicting day & night is available. This display, if left open will be continuously updated to show the passing of time and earth's rotation. This map requires an extra 100K to 1100K of RAM - if you don't want to use the map, set the application memory size to 75K - the program will run and you will not be able to open the map.
• A "Time Differential Calculator" will tell you what time it is in a city, based on the time in another city. Daylight Savings is taken into account based on the given date.
• An "Elapsed Time Calculator" will tell you the time between events in different time zones. Daylight Savings is taken into account based on the given date.
• Three alarms are available and can be set to go off at any time in any time zone (it is only accurate to the minute - seconds are ignored)
Version 1.2b:
Changed name to "Time Palette" - changed creator code to "Tplt"
Special copy site licensed to Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc. - Modified "About Box" & "Get Info" to indicate such. Also modified "get front clicks param" so that when running in the background, a click in a clock's pull down menu will bring the program to the foreground AND activate the menu - prior to this two clicks were required.
Version 1.2a:
Removed original name - changed creator code to "TclK"
Version 1.2:
Fixed bug so that "this location" minute field works with non-zero values. Added Preferences dialog box so that the time may be switched between HH:MM:SS & HH:MM.
Version 1.1:
New Finder icons / Changed the way the popup menus work / Fixed bug that caused it to crash on B&W Macs / Changed creator type from "PWRT" to "PwrT"
Version 1.0: - June 1992 - Initial Release.
SHAREWARE INFORMATION:
Time Palette is shareware. This means that you are permitted to try it out for 10 days, after which you may throw it away or register it. To register the program and receive the latest version, send USD $25 to:
Tryg Inda
P.O. Box 11524
Reno, NV 89510
United States of America
You are permitted to install the program on as many computers as you want as long as it is not used in more than one place at the same time. If you need to use it on more than one computer at the same time, please register as many copies as you will be using.
For discounted pricing on site licenses (For use on more than 5 computers), please contact me directly via E-Mail or Standard Mail.
REGISTRATION & UPGRADES
By sending in the shareware fee, you become a registered user. Registration entitles you to future upgrades. I do plan on upgrading this program periodically and when I do all registered users will be notified. Most upgrades will be free of charge to registered users providing they send me a blank disk and postage to cover the return shipping.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
You may not rent, sell, modify or attempt to reverse engineer this program in any way. You may however redistribute it freely providing this document accompanies the program.
This program and all accompanying documentation is
Support for this software is available via CompuServe E-Mail. Please direct any questions or comments to the CompuServe address below. Thank you for your support.
