ChipLog

Various stuff from some guy.

Vista’s gremlins, now on Linux

10 Comments Posted by chipx86 on February 4, 2007

Vista is an interesting operating system. They have done a number of very cool things with it, and yet it has confused and frustrated me in all new ways. I have been running Vista in a VM for a little while now. I think in many ways it is a better operating system. And there is one thing Vista comes with that beats us hands-down.

It has a Gremlin clock.

The little clock applet on the side has several skins, and one of them is a pink, furry gremlin. I fell in love with this little guy and decided that we must have a Gremlin clock skin ourselves. So I set out to create one, using MacSlow’s cairo-clock. After a couple hours of work, I ended up with this:

I think it’s a cute little thing. I hope others like it too. Just download it and untar into $HOME/.cairo-clock/themes or /usr/share/cairo-clock/themes.

A couple of notes about the theme. cairo-clock doesn’t tend to like themes with different widths and heights and expects the clock face to be in the center of the images. Since the clock face on the Gremlin theme is a bit lower, near the bottom of the gremlin, the theme images had to be made to give a lot of whitespace below the clock. The actual gremlin is on the upper-half of the images. This is not a huge problem except that there appears to be a bug where you can click and drag the clock on parts of the lower region, where it’s completely transparent. Hopefully this isn’t a big problem for most people.

Oh, and MacSlow, if you want to bundle this as part of cairo-clock, I’d be all for it

Now we’re on par with Vista. Yep.

Uncategorized Art, Gremlin-Clock, Linux, Themes

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10 Responses to Vista’s gremlins, now on Linux

Jeff Schroeder February 4, 2007 at 8:46 PM
This looks really good, but there is one visual bug that jumps out to me. The right fang outline is above the lip. I’m assuming you used inkscape to create that grelmin as an svg. If that is correct, click on that tooth, hit page down to change the z-index 1 and put the tooth behind the lip. That would make it look better unless you did that on purpose.

Other than that, awesome job.

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nutbearer February 4, 2007 at 10:08 PM
Aww, that’s so cute

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S. Kochen February 4, 2007 at 11:57 PM
Sweet! I love it!

I need to rig cairo-clock with devil’s pie to stay always on top and reduce opacity. Then I’m all set.

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nuno February 5, 2007 at 3:15 AM
why the “24″?

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Jim February 5, 2007 at 4:30 AM
You gatta give yourself credit. Theirs is probably confined to the sidebar (or possibly one spot in the sidebar). I assume yours can be moved anywhere on the desktop!

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xabbott February 5, 2007 at 12:12 PM
This is the best clock ever. You win.
By the way I think your security code image needs to contain more characters.

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Ian February 5, 2007 at 1:34 PM
Is it just me, or does this remind you of The Cheat?

http://homestarrunner.com/vcr_cheat.html

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Miguel Sousa Filipe February 6, 2007 at 3:07 AM
Hi, I must say, the Vista’s gremlin seems way cooler, it looks like a 3d gremlin… So.. it we’re not on par with Vista yet… but still.. if we simply try to ignore the fact that vista has a much cooler gremlin clock, in that case.. we completely overrun Vista

ps: the security code for you blog is obscenely big – very bad for usability

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MacSlow February 6, 2007 at 3:18 PM
Greetinsg Christian!

Ok, I will see to add the funky little fellow to the bunch of themes in the next release.

Best regards…

Mirco “MacSlow” MÃ¼ller

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ChipX86 February 7, 2007 at 5:52 PM
Jeff: Yeah, I fixed that in the actual uploaded tarball. I just didn’t regenerate the screenshot. Thanks for pointing it out though.

nuno: 24-hour clock

Miguel: I was going to make a 3Dish gremlin, but I ended up deciding on a more cutesy, cartoony gremlin. I just prefer it. No reason we can’t expand on it though!

MacSlow: Awesome, thanks!

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