Sunday, December 26, 2010

Mayan calendar

UPDATE
I made the calendar much more readable by adding text labels around the rings like so:



I've just been cleaning up the code and found a couple of errors that have been corrected. You can find the code for the above here.

--Original post below-----------------------

I have been thinking about setting up a "year clock" using multiple rings showing progress in the year, month, day, hour, and minute. I had come up with some designs like so:


In this case the largest circle is the year and the dot on the circle is where we are in the year. The next largest circle is the month and the dot where we are in the month and so on. I had set it up so that everything moved in increments of 1 second. The right side shows what the set up would look like on midnight of December 31st. The nice thing about this clock is that it will never look the same twice in a year. However, it isn't exactly easy to read :)

Next I tried this:

Which uses similar mechanics as the clock above, but as you can see the rings are marked with information. Each circle rotated so that the current date/time was at the top of the ring. Unfortunately this clock proved to be extremely cpu intensive (it was actually pushing my cpu to 100%). I reoriented the circles to this:

But there was no was this script was going to be viable. But I liked the look of the above, with the rings within rings.

Then later I had the idea to try something else and this is what I came up with:

This is when things started looking very Mayan :)
In the above calendar clock, year is the innermost circle and instead of having the circles move I had indicators move around the circles. I also went on to add some system info indicators like so:


The code for the above is here.

Sector11 has also made some cool looking additions to the calendar part. You can see that here. I have a nice Mayan symbol dingbat font that may well be used in conjunction with my circlewriting script to add some glyphs to the calendar also.

2 comments:

  1. Hey Mr. Peachy. I'd like to swing an idea your way. I really like screenshot-3. Would it viable to assign numbers to each of the arcs within the ring, via your script? And if possible, you can have each arc light up according (as opposed to the moving arrow) to the movement of time.

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  2. Hey Peach, do you know which Myan Calendar you are going off of? There are a couple different ones.

    +1 for what Linh said, that 3rd screenshot is ultra cool

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