Android Chinese character clock

In the Android desktop shot of my Nexus One, you can see some cool Chinese written down the left side in a lovely glowing font. This is in fact the time written in Chinese, designed to be more aesthetic than practical. In order to do this I used three different components.

1. Minimal Text: A fantastic text widget that does some stuff like text-based clocks out of the box, but it’ll also accept locale variables.

2. SL4C and Python for Android: This is the actual script that generates the string of Chinese characters, writing it out as utf-8 to a file on the SD card.

3. Tasker: This fires every five minutes, runs the script and then reads two lines out of the file on SD card and loads them into variables. It then copies the variables to Locale variables.

The Tasker bit is a bit long winded but you can’t seem to write locale variables from SL4A. That said there’s a lot of possibilities to lash stuff up in Python and write things onto your Android screen in beautiful fonts. Note that the CJK font has been replaced with something much nicer than the Android stock font as I discussed in a previous post.

Incidentally the background is a live webcam of my back yard in the Dandenong ranges. The temperature display is from an external weather station and the light gadget toggles my wireless ‘infolights’, another project.