GalaSoft's WPF ColorClock is inspired from the original ChromaChron clock, which was a huge trend in the 1970's and 1980's. The clock shows the time in an original manner, with one colored area per hour. A cache rotating with 30° every hour displays the time. Of course reading the time in that manner is not perfectly accurate like a digital watch, but it's very soothing and with a little experience it's surprisingly easy to differentiate even small time differences.

The following image shows the times 11:30, 3:15, 17:25, 17:35.

The user can set the following options:

• "Use own time": Check this checkbox if you want to use a different time than the PC's. For example, you can use the clock to display New York's time while you're in Moscow.
• "Top Most": Chck this checkbox if you want the clock to be always on top of all your open applications.
• "About the application": Displays an "About" form.
• "Opacity": Make the clock semi-transparent.
• Resize the clock: Make the clock smaller to take less space on your desktop.
• "Set time": Use together with "Use own time" described above.
• "Close": Save the parameters and exit the application.

The following settings are saved when the application exits:

• Clock' position on the screen
• Clock's size
• Clock's opacity
• Time difference entered by the user
• Is the clock on top of all other applications?

The following advanced operations can prevent the application to work correctly, so use them with care:

It is possible to customize the Clock's look&feel. To do this, open the About dialog and click on the "Advanced..." link.

Clicking on the "Advanced" link opens the directory in which ColorClock is installed. The following files can be modified. For XAML code, use an editor like Visual Studio, Expression Blend, or even Notepad:

• Logo.gif and Logo2.gif: These GIF files can be edited. Do not modify their size! After edition, the saved logo will appear in the Clock's logo area.
• The file Logos.xaml specifies where the user is taken to when the logos are clicked. For this, change the content of the "UrlOnClick" string to a valid URL (see code example below)
• Alternatively to GIF, logos can also be written directly in XAML. For this, open the file Logos.xaml in an editor. You can modify the content of the "LogoPanel" StackPanel. For example, the following XAML code displays the words "GalaSoft" in brown color in the Clock's logo area. Additionally, the URL "http://www.galasoft.ch" will be loaded in the user's default browser when the logo is clicked.

Advanced XAML users can of course create much more complex XAML code. For more information about XAML, please refer to XAML tutorials. Do not modify the "LogoPanel"'s height and width.

The Clock's look&feel can also be customized. For this, open the file "DefaultSettings.xaml" in an editor. The following features can be edited:

• The rotating "cache"'s background appearance. The default is a RadialGradientBrush with a gradient from SlateGray to Silver.
• The outer border. The default is a RadialGradientBrush with a gradient from Silver to Black.
• The color of the clock's labels (Opacity, Use Own Time, ...).
• The color of the 12 triangular areas representing the hours.
• The text displayed when the user sets the mouse over the Clock. This can be used to show a text indicating which time zone is displayed, for example.

The other values specifiy the Clock's default settings and shouldn't be edited.

If you want to have more than one clock running with different times (for example to display different time zones), you must use a different EXE file for each time zone, to avoid that the settings are overwritten. To do this, copy the content of the application folder to an alternate location on your hard disk (alternatively, you can use the zip file provided in the Setup area below).

You can then double-click GalaSoft.Wpf.ColorClock.exe. A new instance of the Clock will be started with default settings. All the settings can be modified according to the description above. For example, the following image shows 3 clocks displaying different time zones with different look&feels.

• To install the application using ClickOnce, open this link in Internet Explorer.
• Alternatively, copy this zip file to a folder on your PC, and execute GalaSoftLb.Wpf.ColorClock.exe.
• You can also download the source code.