DigiAnaFun

Digital Clock made up of Analog Clock faces - iPhone now, iPad shortly...

How’d this Happen?

Wandering the web, I saw an Artists work… was intrigued! I reviewed videos until I understood how each digit was formed (and planned a few more shapes) then… one day, in my mind’s eye, I saw how the code should be organized.

Then, i sat down to my machine...

I sat down to my machine, started an Xcode project, fired up Photoshop to build some analog clock face "rudimentary parts" and also to generate a quick app-icon from a well known icon template… and a short "4 hours" later I had this app working in it’s present form! What a fun project and easy reminder that moving from concept thru to complete implementation is just getting easier and faster after years of practice with Objective-C and Xcode!

The Artist:

http://www.humanssince1982.com/

Videos:

http://vimeo.com/52798481

http://vimeo.com/12421714

http://vimeo.com/47249375

My Mind’s Eye:

It’s a well behaved collection of analog clocks! However...

• If you look closely at the analog faces some of the time’s shown can’t really happen with a normal analog clock since the hour hand moves partial distances between the hour marks according to the number of minutes past the hour. So, we have to detune this behavior.

Object: 
 - animated analog clock, with 
 - special detune control to not move hour hand due to minutes after
    the hour (enable/disable) and
 - time-set control: so the analog clock can animate from present position to 
    a specific time.

• Next group’s of six analog clocks behave in concert to show a single digit. So we’ve a Digit Controller which controls the behavior of 6 analog clocks to present a single numeric digit. Next each analog clock in the 6 clock matrix goes to a different time so it can represent its part of the digit. So, we need a table of times (one for each of the six analog clocks) for each digit (0-9) that we want to display. Lastly we need to be able to tell the digit controller what digit to display.

Object: 
 - Digit Controller - controls six analog clocks in 2x3 matrix with
 - table of times, one for each clock, indexed by digit needing to be displayed.
 - lastly, digit-set control: so the matrix can slew from present digit displayed 
    to next desired digit

• Now to make this a clock of clocks, we teach our view controller to determine the current time in 24-hour format and then tell each of the digit matrices to slew to it’s respective digit of the 24 hour time.

• Of course, when you see the app in action, you’ll notice that I also added some controls so we can have fun making the digits move because after seeing them the first time who doesn’t want to make them move?!!!

This all make sense?

Copyright

The code and graphics for this project are © 2014, Iron Sheep Productions, LLC

License

This source is distributed under the GNU v3 License