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.

Colhour