The Bill's Watches program

About the Program

The program was written by me in Visual Basic 2010 (it's a FREE download, thank you so much Microsoft!).

 

Running the Program, and the options

After running the program and the watch appears, moving it around the screen is left click and drag.

The menu with all of the options is displayed by right clicking. This lets you:

  • Exit the program
  • Keep the watch on top of other running programs, or have it stay underneath them
  • Display the link to my website
  • Change the watch type
  • change the zoom level from 25% to 400%. 100% is approximately 200 pixels wide.

Multiple instances of the program can be run to display several different watches at the same time.

Thats it!

Here is the link for the download again

 

Programmer notes

It started as a exercise to see if I could create Windows desktop programs with irregularly shaped borders. However, it turned into a long saga of trying to figure out how to display irregular forms with truely transparrent "soft" edges. Irregular shaped forms turned out to be relatively trivial, but doing this the easy way resulted in nasty jagged edges instead of the smooth semi-transparrent edges we are accustomed to seeing on web pages.

 After many frustrating hours and false leads the solution was found in a post on vbcity.com from 2007!

This is the link to the post titled Form Background with alpha channel?(.png) Thank you Dest1ny

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