When I'm not trying to unravel the mystries and gotchas implicit in moving objects from namespace to namespace and reravelling all of the affected references, I get to take a moment or two to play some with Cairo. I've begun trying to put together little applets that use Cairo and related stuff. It's a good vetting process.

It seems a tradition that after you build a self rendering cairo/pango presentation, you're supposed to build a clock. Everyone loves a clock, right? You can find some very cool looking ones shown on MacSlow's Blog ( here too). Mine isn't quite as elegant as MacSlow's, but they're done completely in Cairo (no backdrop images from a theme). And they do one fun thing that shows how handy Cairo scaling can be. As well as shows off the work Michael did for animations.

I know it works well under Windows and Linux. OSX... well, we're still hoping. It runs under OSX/X11, but it doesn't behave correctly. So I played with it in this silent winkcast. Wink doesn't do the real thing justice. The animation's smoother in real life. And wink adds a bunch of jaggy artifacts. Those aren't there in real life. Use your imagination and enjoy.

You can find the clock and play with it yourself in the "Gizmo" package found in the Open Repository.