Cobasoft Clock

COBASOFT CLOCK

Features Taskbar Icon

The Cobasoft Clock makes some of your daily jobs easier and faster. The clock icon looks good in upgright toolbars, it helps you to track your projects with its Report, lets you quickly set alarms and timers and it can copy the current date and time into the clipboard.

The clock icon

shows the current time in analog form. The line shows the hour, the big dot shows the minute and the little dot shows the second. The icon has a tool-tip that shows the current date and time. You can click on it to start various actions:

Left-Ctrl	QuickMode Alarm
Left-Shift	QuickMode Timer
Right	Main Menu

The Main Menu Copy Timestamp

Click right on the clock icon in the taskbar to get the menu:

AutoStart
Close!
Help...
Edit Alarms...
Edit Timers...
Show Report...
Copy Timestamp!

Copy the current date and time into the clipboard. The string is formatted as specified in the control panel for short-date and short-time. The tool-tip has the same format.

Alarms

The alarms window consists of a yellow hint window, an area with 6 alarm colors and the alarm scale. The alarm window works in QuickMode when you start it directly by holding one shift key and clicking left on the clock icon in the taskbar. It will then close automatically after you have set or modified a single alarm. Every tick on the alarm scale represents 5 Minutes. You can choose one of 6 alarm colors by clicking in the color area. You set an alarm by clicking on the alarm scale or clicking into the color area and dragging into the scale area. You modify an alarm by dragging it around. You delete an alarm by dragging it outside the scale area. The mouse cursor will change to indicate the action. You can press Ctrl-Del to delete all alarm. And with a right-click anywhere in the window you can open a context menu that allows you to close the window or clear all alarms. You can also close the window by pressing the Enter or Escape key.

Timers

The timers window works more or less like the alarms window. The timers window goes into QuickMode when you start it directly by holding one control key and clicking left on the clock icon in the taskbar. It has a 1-minute resolution and when you keep it open long enough, you can see the timer ticks walk left once every minute until they trigger a notification. The alarm and timer notifications look like this:
AlarmMsg

Report

The report is opened with notepad, it looks like: Report

The Cobasoft Clock writes the report to a file. A new header is written when a new day starts or when the program is beeing started. And a new line is written when the user activates another window. The line contains the current time, the elapsed time since the last window activation change and the window caption. You can use the report to track your own work and that of others.

AutoStart

By checking or unchecking the AutoStart menu item, you can enable or disable the autostart feature. If AutoStart is set, the Cobasoft Clock will be loaded whenever somebody loggs on to the computer. Cobasoft Clock uses a registry setting for AutoStart, so it is not visible in the "Startup" folder of the "Start" menu.

Registry Settings

Machine Configuration Personal Configuration

The per-machine configuration of Cobasoft Clock is stored in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE area of the Windows Registry. You can view and edit the registry with tools like 'RegEdit.exe'. It is organized as a tree, like the file system of your computer, and the path to the 'folder' with the settings is "\SOFTWARE\ Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run". The entry with the name "CsClock" controls if Cobasoft Clock is started, it is managed by the AutoStart menu option! The personal configuration of Cobasoft Clock is stored in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER area. and the path to the 'folder' with the settings is "\SOFTWARE\COBASOFT\CLOCK\". If there is an entry with the name 'HasIcon' and a string value of "0", then the icon will not be shown for this user. If there is an entry with the name 'Log', then its string value will be used as filename for the report file. If the value is missing, then the default "c:\temp\ csclock.txt" is used.
Below the starting folder are further folders that contain the alarm and timer settings per user.

I wrote Cobasoft Clock for myself and I hope that you enjoy it as much as I do. Your comments are welcome, just send an email.