History

I wrote SysMetrix for a couple of reasons. First, I never found a skinnable clock out there that did exactly what I wanted. The closest I came was combining the LiteStep modules Chronos and Sentry, but it was cumbersome to combine the two and I wanted something that wouldn't require LiteStep. My main goal was to provide the ability to have an analog clock (call me old-fashioned, but I find it easier to tell time that way) alongside a digital display of the date. Once I had that, I saw another neat LiteStep module named Klok. This module was different in that it anti-aliased the clock hands. That looked fantastic, so I did a lot of research and wrote an anti-aliasing routine for my program.

My second goal for SysMetrix was to be able to make it look really cool while still being flexable and useful. That's where the skinning aspect comes into play. Since it supports things like transparent and irregularly shaped windows, you have great control over what it ends up looking like.

Finally, I used to use another metering program but the authors eventually dropped support and development for it. I looked for a replacement metering program for a long time, but never found anything that I was totally satisfied with. One day the idea struck me that I should turn my program into a clock/metering program. Up until that time it's primary function was to display the date and time. Some of you may remember it by its original name - Clockulator. As time passed I added a lot of metering/display capabilities so ended up renaming it to SysMetrix to better reflect what it did.

I released version 1.0 of SysMetrix back in the end of September 2002. In the three months that followed, it got about 50,000 downloads, and I received a whole lot of emails with suggestions. I did my best to add as many as I could, and released version 2.0 in May of 2003.

Last Updated on Sunday, 14 February 2010 18:50