Screensaver with different images for each day of the month

Can it be done, and if so, how?

[MatthewHSE]

I was approached by a gentleman the other day who wants to make a screensaver for his customers. To fit his purpose, the screensaver needs to be able to keep track of what day of the month it is and display a different series of pictures for each day.

The content would be the same for Jan 1, Feb 1, Mar 1, etc. But, it would need to know how to keep track of leap years and the different numbers of days in different months, so it could "reset" to the first of the next month regardless of how many days the previous month had.

Is there any way to do this? Could it keep track of everything automatically, or could we have it "phone home" somehow to get a list of pictures to display?

None of the screensaver creators I've seen so far will do this. Does anyone have experience creating a screensaver with this kind of functionality?

Thanks,

Matthew

[lZakl]

I have built screen savers from scratch in both C++ and Visual Basic for Windows operating systems. I know that both those languages have a built in API to call to the Windows calender and get the current date and time. Problem with that is -- If the computers time and date is wrong...

I don't know if you are building a screen saver from scratch, or just using some sort of "wizard". Beit case 1, I'd say search the documentation that came with your developing program, as it will most likely tell you how to use the time and date API seamlessly. Beit case 2, I have no experience with wizards, so I can't help you ;0)

-- Zak

[gazraa]

if you were building the screensaver in flash then you could probably do it, but as has just been said, if the users computer date and time are wrong then that could display the wrong image.

All you would do is do a check on the day of the month and display the related image, leap years, different length months etc would be irrelevant as all you would be testing was the day.

[vkaryl]

gazraa's right, Matthew - you only need to have thirty-one days set up, then test for the relevant day; if it's a 28, 29 or 30 day month, the rest of days will zero out.

You might consider some sort of geolocation check to grab the relevant "day" for the world zone the accessor resides in, and then adjust from server-time (which would mean it wouldn't matter whether the accessor's machine time was right or not).... but I'm not a programmer, so don't know how you could really do that.

Maybe claus might know?

[MatthewHSE]

Yes, I hadn't thought of testing the day from the computer clock (goes to show how "up" in these matters I am). So far none of the "wizards" I've looked at have had those kinds of options, and I don't know how to program a screensaver from scratch. I expect it wouldn't be too hard, if I only knew the right language to use, and how to program in it . . . ;)

[kaled]

I have never created a screen saver but it is simply an exe file. If you can create an exe file you can create a screen saver. Any compiler that creates a standard Win32 GUI program should be ok provided you can access Windows API functions.

Kaled.