Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)

On a more practical note, why would you want to have seconds on the clock? I find that most of the time I don't want to know the time to a precision of better than 5 minutes. That may just be me, but when someone asks the time and I read it off my phone as 3:56 it really bothers me and sometimes I convert that to 5-to-4 just to avoid what in most cases is arbitrary extra precision. Sure there are times when minutes count, and there are occasions when I want to time something to the second, but from a UI perspective those are not common use cases that warrant screen real estate for extra digits especially back then.

It might not be the memory concern it once was, but today it might very well be a power concern. Modern laptop display pipelines can save power if they don&#x27;t have to redraw any of the screen: constantly updating status bar animations break that.[1]<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;play&#x2F;wwdc2013&#x2F;712&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.apple.com&#x2F;videos&#x2F;play&#x2F;wwdc2013&#x2F;712&#x2F;</a> (I think the relatively short graphics section mentions this. Can&#x27;t seem to find the talk that goes into it in more detail...)

Too bad the team which made that decision wasn&#x27;t available to help the VS Code team not use 13% CPU to render a blinking cursor (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13940014" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13940014</a>)

This is a good article, but keep in mind the timeframe it writes about. Not only was it 22 years ago, its writing about systems at the bare minimum system requirements. (Personally speaking, I remember speccing out a previous gen Windows 3.1 machine with 8MB of RAM in 92... and this is covering 4MB systems in 1995. By that time, 8-16MB would&#x27;ve been common.)<p>Another story from the time is that I went to CompUSA (as a &#x27;spectator&#x27;) on the night of the Windows95 release. (It was a midnight release and the stores were open late.) There was a line out the door that snaked around through the store past the Windows 95 boxes, the Plus Pack, boxes, MS Office, and then the memory upgrade desk...

I worked on a visual programming language in late 80s. It would compile it&#x27;s programs but the compiler was really slow, took minutes for small programs.<p>We worked on optimizing it but couldn&#x27;t find much to optimize. Then the founder took out the code that updated the progress bar as it compiled and compiles finished 10x faster.<p>This was on Mac Plus.

And on current systems, updating every second would decrease battery life by preventing your system from sleeping. Modern systems can easily sleep for more than a second at a time, even with the screen on (and not updating).<p>I also, personally, can&#x27;t stand to have distractions like that on my screen away from where I want to focus.

Raymond once had an article about why the date&#x2F;time control panel is not a calendar <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20050621-04&#x2F;?p=35253" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;oldnewthing&#x2F;20050621-04&#x2F;?p=...</a><p>In Windows 7 they&#x27;ve finally given up and the UI lets you easily scroll up and down through months after clicking on the clock. (Edit: sorry I meant Windows 10)

Would have thought it would be useless because our eyes notice movement in the periphery and it distracts you to look at it. I would be annoyed with some animation going on that I don&#x27;t care about.

On Linux, there is a very practical reason: to reduce the number of wakeups per second, and save power.<p>You may think it is far fetched, but try a minimalist XFCE or LXDE desktop, run powertop updating every 5 seconds (so that screen refresh from powertop do not alter your measures) and see for yourself.<p>For that same reason, you may want to disable the blinking cursor, and conky, and other gizmos that blink things on the screen.

... in Windows 95.<p>I mean, the article describes why in versions of Windows from an era that was much more memory-constrained. Even in 2003, Windows 95 was as old as Android 2.2 is now. I configured my task bar to display seconds and can&#x27;t say Cinnamon is hogging that much more memory or CPU because of it.

My gut reaction was going to be that it fared poorly in user testing. I&#x27;d be pretty distracted by such a thing and prone to idly watching it :-D

One thing I&#x27;ve always wondered about the taskbar clock is why they didn&#x27;t just follow an existing time formatting standard...<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;3.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-9pDonc_uipU&#x2F;UEoMOdhA-eI&#x2F;AAAAAAAABw8&#x2F;8gyhuFzTG3A&#x2F;s1600&#x2F;Edit_Digital_Clock_Configuration_Window.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;3.bp.blogspot.com&#x2F;-9pDonc_uipU&#x2F;UEoMOdhA-eI&#x2F;AAAAAAAABw...</a><p>...and invented their own:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.groovypost.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2010&#x2F;01&#x2F;image_714.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.groovypost.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2010&#x2F;01&#x2F;image_...</a>

I always have the seconds on (Ubuntu) and it&#x27;s a good feature. I leave work every day at 17:28:15 sharp, otherwise I will miss my train (London DLR) and yes, seconds matter in this case.

I have been using T-Clock for many years to get seconds in the taskbar clock. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;White-Tiger&#x2F;T-Clock" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;White-Tiger&#x2F;T-Clock</a>

MacOS can optionally show seconds. Anyone know if it has similar benchmark impact?

If it&#x27;s just for benchmarks, why not make it a preference (defaulted off), so benchmarks can be run with the default settings (off) just fine, but people can turn it on if they want to?

Funny thing is that Android removed in 5.0 animations in status bar to save power as redrawing frequently will eat battery.

How could I benchmark this on XFCE nowadays?

I always switch it on (KDE).

&gt; Because that blinking colon and the constantly-updating time were killing our benchmark numbers.<p>Like Visual Studio Code uses 12% CPU in idle due to cursor blinking? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13940014" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13940014</a><p>In comparison the Windows Shell (up to Win7) is a lot more efficient and coded in C&#x2F;C++.