I had never thought of getting a review in detail like this. And it truly pointed out the main issue of beauty clocks including MMclock(美女时钟), that is how to make this idea interesting and not useless.
I am going to repost this review in my blog. Hope Slartibartfarst, the author, would not mind. :)
Well, what can I say?
I tried this Chrome extension out of interest – just to see what it was like. It works just fine, albeit with a bit of a delay when it starts as the latest picture is being fetched for the first time. Also, the pictures are not persistent, and go away if you move to view another tab. So when you want to see the time again, the process has to be restarted (including the delay).
I tried this Chrome extension out of interest – just to see what it was like. It works just fine, albeit with a bit of a delay when it starts as the latest picture is being fetched for the first time. Also, the pictures are not persistent, and go away if you move to view another tab. So when you want to see the time again, the process has to be restarted (including the delay).
I had come across this *sort* of idea some years back, but that was for a PC-based version, not a cloud-based version. In the PC-based version, the idea was that you would have 1,440 different pictures of the time being displayed. (i.e., 24 x 60 – one for every minute in a day). The idea was interesting but had little merit as there was certainly no advantage over the existing, highly accurate chronometric digital time display that all PCs were by then able to provide – and it needed a local storage of pictures and constantly-running software to fetch and display them. It was an unnecessary system overhead. So it pretty much fell into the “interesting but useless” category.
However, the difference between that clock and MMclock is that, as far as I can recall, no-one made the suggestion that there should be a pretty picture around the clock, or a pretty girl in the picture. No, the only thing to be pictured then seemed to be a boring, plain representation of the time. MMclock is thus a new (for me at least) twist on an old theme. It uses a different technology. It is “cute” in the way that a lot of Japanese things are produced, but it’s not Japanese, it’s Chinese (or at least, the author hosts a .cn website – mmclock.cn).
MMclock has similar limitations to the old idea. It gives no advantage over the existing, highly accurate chronometric digital time display that all PCs are able to provide. Furthermore, it does not tell me the precise time “right now”. It is too sluggish and inaccurate (no seconds) for that, so approximate time (give or take a minute) is the best it can seem to do. The fact that to use it you have to be connected to the Internet, and you need it to be running constantly as a Chrome extension, means that it is consuming PC resources and bandwidth as it traverses back and forth across the cloud fetching pictures. This is all an unnecessary system overhead and is not an optimal use of resources. It is not useful either, but what it does do is serve up pictures of attractive-looking Chinese girls to your desktop – you will see a new one every minute, if you want to keep watching. This may seem like variety for those of us who like looking at pretty Asian girls, but the same photos are probably all going to be there tomorrow, so you may tire of it eventually.
MMclock will not, for me, be able to replace my BetaClock, so I shall carry on using that – it is the most useful clock/calendar that I have found so far.
If MMclock thus falls into the “interesting but useless” category for me, then there should still be kudos going to its author, for a novel and cute twist to an old idea, and really nicely done too.
If MMclock thus falls into the “interesting but useless” category for me, then there should still be kudos going to its author, for a novel and cute twist to an old idea, and really nicely done too.
