macOS Programming is fun

A few days ago I decided to test my graphical and mathematical skills and decided to make an analogue clock (later on a digital clock).

A friend of mine is a professional programmer and was eager to see me and together we decided to spice up my analogue clock.

It is quite tricky but exactly because of that also challenging. The longer I work on that clock, the more features I want to add to it.

First I got the system date. I broke it up in hours, minutes and seconds. The position (angle) of the hands has to be calculated. The angle of the hour hand depends on the current hour, but also on the minutes that passed since the whole hour. If you want to display 1:30 the hour hand must be exactly between one and two, and not yet pointing to one. The minute hand must be exactly halfway of the clock. But I also decided to make the angle of the minute hand depend on the last whole minute and how many seconds that are passed.

To make the hand of the same length, you must also calculate the sine and the cosine of the angle.

This topic is not to discuss a problem, but to express the fun I have with graphical programing and the mathematical knowledge that I have to use it.

Who of you have done similar to the above?

The next challenge is to make a normal calculator, maybe followed by a scientific calculater or an easy game like Minesweeper or Solitaire game (a card game).

I expanded my clock with an analogue 24 hours system. The second and the minute hand have the same position as a normal 12 hours clock. The hour hand will go twice as slow. This means that:
- on a normal analogue clock you see the same at 10:40 (10:40am) in the morning as at 22:40 (10:40pm) in the evening;
- on an analogue 24 hours clock you see a different picture at 10:40 than at 22:40.

You can switch:
- Cmd-1 for a 12 hour analogue clock;
- Cmd-2 for a 24 hour analogue clock;
- Cmd-D for a digital clock.

Such a 24 hour clock looks like:

I have the same experience, Larswik.

Especially when I want to add new features to my clock, I find out that I have done things in a clumsy, inefficient way and there are more lines of code than actually needed.

Sometimes I see the same code several times. Then I think: "This should be done more efficiently." I recode it. Of course I also retest it, because of a chance of regression bugs (by recoding, things that worked before may stop working suddenly).

Sometimes things work, yes, but it could be visually more appealing. Then I try to chance that. My clock just consisted of lines (12 for marking the numbers 1 to 12) and three more lines denoting the hour, the minute, and the second hand. The friend, a professional programmer, browsed through the Xcode IDE (he is new to it, and I try to tell him the basics) and the NSGradient object makes it visually more appealing. The background of the clock and the markings 1 to 12 have some gradient effects and the second hand also has a gradient.

The digits of the digital mode consist of 7 segments. These are just light green lines when lit, and very dark green (close to black) when unlit on a black baground. But a segment is actually not a line (unless on old LED calculators of Texas Instruments) but it is a polygon actually, consisting of 5 or 6 points. I may work on it.

I can also choose to make the digital display differently like on modern digital watches. That is a gray display and very dark gray (close to black) segments. Then you have the feel of looking at a LCD display of a watch.

I think that would be very hard, to write a clock program in machine or assembly language. Especially calculating the sine and cosime for the angles and the algorithm to draw a line from one point to the other.

I have added some stuff to the clock: I went pretty far with it. The features of my clock are now:
- analogue 12 hours clock;
- digital clock;
- analogue 24 hours clock;
- analogue 10 hours clock as intended at the eind of the 18th century in France (dividing 1 hour in 100 minutes and 1 minutes in 100 seconds);
- anticlockwise clock.

The clock is visually appealing now, but the digital feature needs more love, that is: has to be beautified. You just see bright and dark green lines making digits (like a 7 segments display would) but it should look more like the digits in a digital watch.

To say something about the programming languages I learned: I started with BASIC on the Philips P2000 and on the Commodore 64. Later on Turbo C and Turbo Pascal on MS-DOS machines later on for Windows 3.0, 3.1 and OS/2 Warp. I tried to learn COMAL, COBAL, APL, assembly language for the 6502 and the 6809 microprocessor and the MC680000 and new processors in the MC68000 series.