Digital Clock 5.2.2

This is a regular maintenance release + minor feature release, recommended to all users. Key changes:

• fixed background rendering when widget margins set
• quick_note: configurable note in settings dialog
• added more spacing configuration options
• added background rendering option that provides similar behavior as it was in Digital Clock 4

This is the last release. I'm closing the project. This time likely forever. All sources and binaries will remain, I'll not delete anything. It's time to go for this little project that appeared just as playground. And as a last words, some short story behind this Digital Clock 5 that actually appeared "all of sudden".

At the very beginning of 2023 I started learning some new stuff just to maintain my professional skills. As result of this process new skin engine has appeared and it was much more flexible than the one old clock used. A bit later (March-April) I decided to implement some "demo" app to try it out, so so-called "Digital Clock Next" has appeared. At the end of August 2023 this became usable app rather than just demo. It was too sorry to just throw it away, and after a lot of thinking and doubts, I uploaded (end of October 2023) it here. Surprisingly, after 3 years of project inactivity, this new upload was found immediately - ~3k downloads after the first week. People started contacting me and complaining about many missing features and so on. As result of this, in March 2024 a very huge update has happened to that "Next" version, that later became "the base" of Digital Clock 5 you see. The "actual" Digital Clock 5 started somewhere at the beginning of August 2024 and the very first version was completed at the end of the same month. I had no plans to create it, but people looked for (not existed at that time) "Digital Clock 5", also that incompatible "Digital Clock Next" existed. Some mental disorder has happened to me those days, and this became "the starting point" for creating the new version. Insane coding during those 2 weeks helped me a lot, and I think I completely recovered (at least felt much better) at the end of month, just very tired. Of course, a lot bugs and other issues were there (coding in inadequate state and with no plans), and many of them were non-trivial. As result, project was completely rewritten in January 2025 (this is what it is now more or less). But still, this "Digital Clock 5" is actually the result of mental disorder.

Many thanks to the users who supported me, I really appreciate this.

General info

This version should be a good replacement for the old Digital Clock 4, most of the features (including plugins) are already available, only some minor or dubious stuff not yet ported. Feel free to ask for what is missing, this will help prioritize the work. But keep in mind, not everything is possible, at least because of totally new "independent multi-window system".

Most of the skins from old Digital Clock 4 are included into this version, but it's also possible to use whatever font instead of skin (this was the main reason for rewriting completely from scratch, as the old clock had very poor font support due to its design) if you can't find something that you like.

Some translations are made by AI, so may be weird or just incorrect, feel free to help to translate it, see Wiki for details. No tech skills or special tools required, just a web browser.

Project is hosted on GitHub, source code and various documentation can be found there, but downloads are only here, on SourceForge. I have no plans to publish downloads on GitHub.

System requirements:

• Windows 10 1809 and above, 64-bit only (even for portable version), Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2022 should be installed, ARM-based Windows is not (yet) supported
• macOS 13.0 and above, both Intel and Apple Silicon are supported (universal binary)

Some key features:

• full compatibility with old skin format
• very good font rendering (minimal difference with text editors)
• very good Unicode support (including emoji)
• font-like rendering for image-based skins due to skin format extension (few included skins use this feature)
• gradient filling for digits and background
• multiple time zones (or just multiple independent windows) support
• tray icon displays local time (implemented just-for-fun)

Limitations:

• app is unsigned and will not be signed, I don't have extra ~100$ for 1 year certificate and don't want having headache with integrating it to GitHub Actions or whatever else build server
• alarm plugin will not appear, just because it will be unreliable, as it can work as expected only while computer is running, what is not true for the most cases (computers are in some kind of "sleep" mode most of time, and regular apps just don't work)
• Linux is not supported anymore (even technically it is possible to build), as clock is totally useless in Wayland environments just because it simply can't be moved, and I don't want to implement any hacks to overcome this design feature

And as final note some sad news: do not expect as good quality as it was for the older version... Unfortunately, degradation is everywhere, nobody cares about software quality anymore, and many bugs/issues/strange things and so on happen due to the reasons not controlled by me... even worse, many such things somewhere inside the operating systems themselves, or just a "side effects" (or even "expected behavior") of unnecessary but "cool and popular" modern "features" which are in most cases just artificial restrictions by their nature, both for developers and users (hello, macOS and other Apple products!).

The most famous example of such unreliable behavior is "keep window on top" feature on Windows. It never worked stable since ~2015 in whatever software. Any hacks to get it work +/- reliably also usually stop working in 1-2 months. Part of this issue is inside Qt (the UI framework I'm using), but if you don't try to change it on runtime and only setup it during app startup instead, this part goes away, but the rest is still there, somewhere inside Windows. Don't believe me? Try old good and rock-solid Winamp (or any other old-school "pure Windows" software that was not updated for 10+ years) on modern Windows! Even fully updated end-of-life Windows 7 is enough to get this simple feature to work very unreliably, but Windows 7 from ~2013 works fine! Windows 10 is even worse... And this is just the only thing. So, do not expect too much, sorry...