15-Minute Reviews :: SkinClock v1.8

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s review is on SkinClock version 1.8 by Alcyonesoft – A skinnable system tray clock replacement.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“SkinClock is the advanced replacement for standard Windows clock having eye catching skinned interface and providing you with additional features. You are able to select between multiple skins those are differently styled and colored. It lets you showing current date and calendar only with the one mouse click, adjust and synchronize time via Internet easily. SkinClock has advanced alarm center which lets user to create and run reminders.”

Quick Pros

• Main interface easy to use
• Calender handy for checking dates
• Alarms heavily customizable
• Skinnable clock nice

Quick Cons

• Calendar could show on it which days have alarms
• Alarms could have a little better control of day selection
• Clock seems out of place in system tray – Too big
• 10.5MB and 2-3 percent CPU usage footprint rather large

Expansion

Years upon years many of us have been staring at the same clock in the System Tray. Some of us have found ways to replace their system clock with something more effectively in the past; However, many of us have been quietly sitting with it just staring at us, providing nothing more than the time and a way to change the time. Maybe this is our chance to take our time back, so to speak.

The main window is nice to get things running and easy to get around. 4 main buttons to navigate from calendar, alarms, skins and settings. The calendar is pretty handy for quickly checking dates and such; It would have been nicer if it showed you your current alarms and which days they fall on, and make them clickable. The alarms themselves are fairly powerful; Offering you alarm sounds, messages, execute files and shutdown with a wide variety of settings for timing. It would have been to have a bit more control over timing, such as 3rd Sunday of the month, 1st Monday of September and so forth.

The clock skins are pretty nice – The inclusion of 2 to 4 buttons for quickly accessing clock settings, alarm settings, a hidden timer function and much more. With that said, none of the themes seem to fit the system tray fully top-to-bottom, not looking generally great, and leave sizable margin on the right as well, chewing up more Taskbar real estate than would be needed. One plus is that the colored skins you can adjust the hue or even have it automatically cycle the hue.

One fairly large concideration you should take into thought when contemplating this application is its resource footprint; With 10.5MB memory usage and 2-3 percent CPU usage, it is a heavyweight to have for sure. If you have 512MB RAM, that is almost 2 percent memory usage, and 2-3 percent CPU usage is a lot to have chewed up full-time for a simple System Tray clock.

Final Verdict

I do have mixed feelings on this application. While the interface looks nice, somehow the System Tray skins all look less-than-optimal with them being smaller than the bar top-to-bottom and not fitting the theme well (Amplified by the fact that it doesn’t fit in the space.) While free, I’d likely recommend to try it to see if it suits your needs, but really keep in mind the amount of resources chewed up for usage is very heavy, especially the CPU usage. As for paying $19.95 for this application; The author does offer a deal where if you try one of the affiliate applications, you get a copy of it free; I would look into that first before dishing out cash for this. It may not be worth it, but worth checking into further. I’d likely not recommend picking this title up just due to the fact of how much resources are chewed up by this application.

There are plenty of alternatives out there. A freeware one I quickly came upon was Free Desktop Clock (No alarms or calendar) and there were plenty more when I searched for “System Tray clock replacement”.

Posted by BladedThoth on Saturday, July 07, 2007