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Friday, April 20, 2007

Pixel Breaker's Polar Clock: A Beautiful Visualization That Still Needs Work

Pixel Breaker has made a lovely visualization of a clock with the time of day, date, and day of the week represented by colored bars growing in a circular pattern and changing colors to represent how soon they will advance the digit above them. (Awkward, but I'm not sure how else to put it.) You can see the clock in action here, and download it as a screensaver as well.

Although the hands have been replaced by advancing bars, the bars all click in chords (six degrees per click for seconds and minutes, 30 degrees for hours. This makes sense for days of the week, dates, and months, but for the time of the day, it seems odd that the function of the clock would not reflect the fluidity of time that a growing shape, rather than a physical hand, suggests. I wonder if this was planned or not.

Less of an aesthetic choice and more of a true problem is the syncing of the second hand's numbering and its advance. Notice it? [Via]

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