Digital Clock 5

WARNING: like many other free and open-source apps, my macOS app is not signed (more correctly it is ad-hoc signed). so macOS complains about this, and doesn't allow to launch the app by default. If you don't know how to proceed in this case, you can watch this ~20 sec video.

This is the next major release of your beloved Digital Clock 4. It was re-written from scratch, with totally new skin engine, but with compatibility in mind (old skins are 100% compatible). Based on feedback and popularity of my "previous new" "Digital Clock Next" project, I reconsidered many things and decided to provide "the continuation" of Digital Clock 4, rather than starting something new.

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.

Also I imported translations from Digital Clock 4, so interface may be partially translated, 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.

Project will not be actively developed compared to Digital Clock 4, I achieved most of what I wanted to implement (mostly just as some challenge), but this version will be supported for some time due to its popularity.

Unfortunately, this project has no future for the reasons not controlled by me, it was surprising for me that I was able to achieve even such results. So, it can be closed very suddenly.

System requirements have changed (mostly due to Qt 6):

• Windows 10 1809 and above, 64-bit only (even for portable version), Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2019 should be installed, ARM-based Windows is not supported
• macOS 12.0 and above, macOS 13 and above is highly recommended, both Intel and Apple Silicon are supported (universal binary)
• Linux is not supported anymore (even technically it is possible to build), as clock is totally useless in Wayland environments

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 numbers and background
• per-number background (experimental)
• 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
• many options affecting window behavior (like "keep window on top" or "transparent for mouse") require app restart now, unfortunately changing such things on runtime leads to very unexpected results nowadays (and behavior is platform-specific)

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 reasons not controlled by me... even worse, many such things somewhere inside the operating systems itself, or just a "side effects" (or even "expected results") 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, but if you don't try to change it on runtime (only setup during app startup), this part goes away, but the rest is still here (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 only thing. So, do not expect too much, sorry...