Laszlo ClockBlox

Laszlo ClockBlox is now locked to the top right corner.

So this clock has a long and storied history. And I play a minor part in it. David Temkin was looking at Konfabulator. He was looking at the language and how it was constructed. I too looked at it and grabbed the source for their nifty clock (visible on the front page).

The language was simmilar enough that the prot was straightforward. The interesting things we learned about LZX and Konfabulator was that we could do the same job with less code and fewer art resources. Oh yeah, and it runs in a web page. So, since I had used some of their art, we couldn't ship that with the product. It was decided that we would have a clock in the product somewhere. It's visible on the demos page on Laszlo's site here as the World clocks.

Bret Simister rewrote the shadow code using a much more complex algorythm than I had initially, but when I looked at it, he was doing the same job. Since this was to be demo/example code for people learning LZX we pulled it back to the simpler method.

But the point is that this is another one of my very minor contributions to the blogosphere. I hope you enjoy it!

[UPDATE] I forgot to mention the influence of Lyndon Wong on the wolrd clocks app. He was the one who approached me about using it there and also involved our designers here at Laszlo.