The Clock of Radio Four
I listen to Radio Four a lot. For me - and I suspect many others who share my addiction - the schedule has a dual purpose. It tells me what's on, but also how far through the day we are. This clock is for everyone who leaves the house by 'Thought for the Day' and feeds the cat at quarter-past 'Front Row'.
You need an SVG viewer (such as ). Some viewers may have difficulty with the javascript - there's a tick box at the bottom to turn it off. You can also adjust the time zone and choose a different station to view.
It's built in Java with JSP. A daily cron task on my server downloads and unzips the feed. The JSP page that produces the clock refreshes its cache of programme details each day. I use the open source TVAnytime parser to handle the XML, creating simple 'programme' objects with title, date, summary and url fields to manipulate. Positioning the titles on the SVG needed just a little trigonometry, as did the initial angle of the three hands. The rotation uses the animateTransform tag with varying durations.
With more time, I'd like to
- avoid the javascript issue
- look at colour coding programmes by genre
- write the summaries in interesting ways (round the clock face?)
- offer a range of configurable designs
- offer direct 'listen again' links where possible
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