Richard Siddaway's Blog

Last month I started playing with WPF to show how a multi-coloured clock could  be displayed on screen. This was picked up and an easier version was created by Doug Finke using the ShowUI module from codeplex  http://showui.codeplex.com/.

Other links are here

http://msmvps.com/blogs/richardsiddaway/archive/2011/07/08/an-easier-clock.aspx

 

As well as wanting to know the time I often want to set a count down timer.  I did a version of this ages ago using PowerGadgets but  if you don’t have that then we can do something with show UI

Import-Module ShowUI                        
            
function timeleft {            
 $ts = $close - (Get-Date)            
 $time = $ts.ToString() -split "\."            
 $time[0].Substring(3,5)            
}            
            
            
$close = (Get-Date).AddMinutes(35)            
            
$windowAttributes = @{            
    WindowStartupLocation = "CenterScreen"            
    SizeToContent = "WidthAndHeight"            
    WindowStyle = "None"            
    Background = "Transparent "                        
            
    On_MouseRightButtonDown = { Close-Control}            
    On_MouseLeftButtonDown  = { $_.Handled = $true;$window.DragMove() }            
    On_Loaded = {            
        Register-PowerShellCommand -ScriptBlock {            
            $window.Content.Content = timeleft            
        } -Run -In "0:0:0.5"            
    }            
}                        
            
$labelAttributes = @{            
    Content = timeleft            
    FontFamily = "Impact, Arial"            
    FontWeight = 800            
    FontSize = 90            
}                        
            
New-Window @windowAttributes -AllowsTransparency -Show  {            
    Label @labelAttributes -Name Clock -Foreground (            
        LinearGradientBrush $(            
            GradientStop -Color Red    -Offset 1            
            GradientStop -Color Orange -Offset 0.85            
            GradientStop -Color Yellow -Offset 0.7            
            GradientStop -Color Green  -Offset 0.55            
            GradientStop -Color Blue   -Offset 0.4            
            GradientStop -Color Indigo -Offset 0.2            
            GradientStop -Color Violet -Offset 0            
        )            
    )            
}

All I changed was to point the Content to the timeleft function instead of get-date. The function takes the closing time – in this case 35 minute from starting and subtracts the current datetime (from get-date). The resultant timespan is converted to a string and split at the millisecond point. The minutes and seconds are extracted as  a substring to display

By the way – anyone noticed the deliberate(?) mistake with the colours