Colhour is my and Peters system to visualize time using colors. We wanted to extend the previous web site a bit by adding more information about the system and link to projects that were using the system. Also, the former site didn’t set the “Right now” text in the current times color but black only.
I decided to rewrite the flash content from scratch, mainly because I wanted to do it in ActionScript 2, and then use the new BitmapData class available in Flash 8. It was my first “real” AS2 project but I’ve done some Java before and a lot of reading about AS2 so there weren’t any problems to make it work. I used the BitmapData#getPixel to get the actual color from the flash movie from specified positions, instead of hard coding all available colors into an array and then update the text field with correct color from the current time. After spending too much time with some wierd coordinate error I got (and make a ASCII-generator from everything), I finally worked it out.
After the first update, the update method won’t trigger if nothing has happend to the hand (year, month etc). Since most visitors of the site won’t wait so long that they’ll see any update in year, month, date or even hour, it was unnecessary waste of CPU to update all hands all the time.
My friends over at Konst & Teknik asked me to code their web site. It’s only one page, that should show the results from Google Image searches for the word in their name, “konst” and “teknik” (“art” and “technology” in swedish). I liked the idea and also got the opportunity to do some ruby scripting and try the Prototype JavaScript library.
Server side
Since Google currently doesn’t offer any API to do other searches than pure web searches and we wanted to use Google Image Search, I had to do my own image fetching script. The script is a ruby script that will pull the images and info from Google Images and store them in a local index file. First, I used Net::HTTP but I found out that it had problem dealing with the swedish characters (used in swedish, ie åäö) so I changed the URL-fetching to use curl instead, witch also was slightly faster. The index is written from ruby using Marshal. It is scheduled to run twice a week using cron.
Client side
My first approach was to make one class that downloads and shows the image for the given keyword. Then create one instance for each word (konst and teknik), controlling the preloading and image-switching every 4th second (meaning; updating one of the images every second second). But I found out it was hard to make the updates smooth and exacly on time.
Instead I split the client side script into of two main classes, the Preloader class and the Switcher class. The Preloader triggers a request using AJAX to a server side ruby script that will return a new random image from the image index and then stores the info received from the server in a local array. After some delay the script will start over again with a new request for another image.
When the Preloader is done indexing some images then the Switcher will kick in and start showing them and switch every other second between the images for each word as long as there are images preloaded and ready to be shown. If the Preloader is out of preloaded images then the Switcher will pause and show a loader while the Preloader’s buffering.
We wanted the images to be vertical aligned by bottom but I couldn’t make it work with CSS only (nor with vertical-align, float or position). Instead, the script is switching between two <div>s (for each word, totally four divs) and when the “not active” div got a new image loaded into it, it will find its dimensions and set its margins automatically. The next time it’s time to switch image (for this word) this div will be shown instead, the other one becomes invisible and get the next image loaded.
The script should work fine in Safari, Firefox, Camino etc (even WinIE6). It needs some code cleaning (mostly OO-issues; currently I’m referencing the instances from the class, which I think is a bit ugly) but I’m releasing it anyway.
This is the second version of the Colhour as iChat picture I posted the other day. The biggest improvment is that it will show both the hours and the minutes.
There’re two versions of the script. The first one uses a Ruby script together with RMagick to create every image on the fly with the current time. But since it requires some installation of Ruby gems and other libraries, I decided to make a version with all 1440 images pregenerated (created with a small Ruby script of course) so you wont need to install the other libraries. The AppleScript still uses some Ruby, but it’s included in OS X, and should (at least) work on a basic OS X 10.4 Tiger installation. Let me know otherwise.
Instructions on how to set up a cron job to run the script every minute is in the previous post. Both the on-the-fly generated version (update-gen.scpt) and the pregenerated version (update-pregen.scpt) are included in the zip file.
This is a small AppleScript to update your iChat picture from the Colhour system that I have created with Peter. From the beginning I wanted to update it every second, but since it used 60% – 80% CPU, I decided to go with an update rate of once a minute instead. So you’ll only be able to se the current minute from the iChat picture.
To install:
Download and extract somewhere on your hard drive. Edit your crontab file manually or with an app like Cronnix to run the script every minute. It should look something like this:
I suppose I should do this in the “correct OS X Tiger” way by using launchd instead, but that’s for next time. As well as update it to show the the full date in different squares (without seconds due to CPU usage) like the one on harald.net
Source included.
Version 0.2
Added a check in the script to see if iChat is running or not, so it wouldn’t launch iChat every minute.
This is an attempt (and my first Apple Script) to generate an html-page using Peter Ström’s E-mail system. Everything could probably been done better etc but it works for now.
