Copyright © 2000 by Telsa Gwynne
The AfterStep Clock is an applet which displays the time in both analogue (clockface) and digital format along with the day of the week and the date. It is based on the look of the NeXTStep clock. It is part of the gnome-core package in October GNOME (gnome-core-1.0.53) and part of the gnome-applets package in later releases. This guide is written referring to to the clock distributed in gnome-applets-1.1.2.
The AfterStep Clock applet was written by Beat Christen (<spiff@longstreet.ch>) and Patrick Rogan (<rogan@lycos.com>) Please report bugs in it to the GNOME bug tracking system. You can do this by following the guidelines on that site or by using bug-buddy from the command-line. For the package, put gnome-applets.
It can be added to the panel by clicking button 3 on an empty area of the panel and then following the sequence Applets->Clocks->ASClock or by using the command asclock_applet --activate-goad-server=asclock_applet
You don't need to do anything special to this clock. It will just sit on your panel and tell the time for you. Various options are available with the mouse:
Pressing mouse button 1 has no effect.
Holding down mouse button 2 allows you to move the clock about in the same way you move anything on the panel.
Pressing mouse button 3 brings up the standard choices available for applets, including a preferences menu explained below, and an About box.
The preferences dialogue box (which calls itself "ASClock Settings" rather than preferences) is divided into two sections, one for general options, and one for your timezone.
The general preferences tab has three options:
Clicking this checkbox will, predictably enough, display the time in a 12 hour format. The default is off, and that a 24-hour clock is used.
When the AfterStep clock applet starts up, by default it displays a blinking colon between the hour and minute display. Clicking this checkbox turns this blinking off.
The AfterStep clock applet can take on a number of different appearances. You can select these from this window.
The timezone preferences tab shows a pretty picture of the earth, centred on the timezone region currently selected, and a list of timezones you can choose from. This is likely to be a very long list. If no timezone is selected, the local time on the system clock is used as a default.
You can't change the time through the clock properties. This is not really a bug; it's because you must be root to alter the time for the whole of the system, using the date command.
If you adjust the system clock backwards using the date command, the clock will stop working until the system time reaches the time the clock displays. It will start working normally then.
Switching between a lot of themes or a lot of timezones seems to use inordinate amounts of memory up.