Home - Paragon Bit Foundry

Welcome to Paragon Bit Foundry!

Specializing in elegant digital timepieces and ambient icons for your desktop

Welcome

In the English language, the word time is the most common noun that we use everyday. We use it to know when to wake in the morning, when to schedule meetings with colleagues and friends and family, and when to sleep at night. We also mark time beyond our daily routines to include important weekly, monthly and annual events on our journey through life.

So what better way to celebrate the passage of time than with highly useful and imaginative digital clocks and calendars! On this website you will find over 50 applications for your Windows desktop that cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from interesting daily clocks to sports calendars, and from useful utilities to entertaining digital toys.

All of these ambient icons share a common design philosophy: colorful and ever-changing images, informative and highly-customizable tooltip text, and simple and clear menu options. Each app is carefully designed to perform a specific task and to do it very well. Advanced users will enjoy the satisfying level of depth and uncompromising attention to detail, and casual users will appreciate that most icons are immediately useful directly after installation with little to no configuration needed.

Feel free to explore the selection of applications below to find your favorites, and if you have an idea for a new icon, just
let us know and you could see your creation come to life!

Ambient Icons

What are "ambient icons", anyway? They are small desktop applications that run silently in the corner of the screen, and yet provide a wealth of images and information that belie their size. Some also have a “floating window” that displays more detailed images than a simple icon can show, such as a large photo of the current phase of the Moon, or a diagram of the positions of our neighboring planets in their orbits.

As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and likewise, a screenshot on a webpage is worth 1K words! The screen capture to the right shows the notification area in the bottom-right corner of the desktop screen, near where the Windows clock normally resides:

If you have moved your Windows Taskbar to either the left, right, or top of the screen, the notification area is still near the Windows clock, so look for our icons nearby.

Just to the left of the clock you can see a small icon with an image that represents the Earth. This ambient icon application is called “Earth Icon”, and it shows the current sunlit side of our home planet. Since the clock says it is around noontime and we’re in the Eastern time zone, the east coast of North America is centered in the image. During the day, the image “rotates” to bring the next part of the Earth into view, so in this example, at sunset the east coast will appear at the far right side of the image.

If we hover the mouse over the Earth’s image and look above and to the right of the icon, we see that “tooltip text” appears that provides more information. In this example, Earth Icon is configured to show the current day of the year, complete with the percentage of the year that has passed so far, and the number of days remaining. Similarly, the week of the year is shown, along with the birthstone and flower for the month of March, and the progress through the current season.

As time passes, the icon image and the tooltip text changes accordingly. All of our ambient icons work in this same way, providing ever-changing and always up-to-date information at a glance. Each icon has its own text that pertains to it, and can be configured to show just the information that you like the most and that suits your personal style.

Some applications, Earth Icon included, also show a “floating window” with an expanded view of the icon’s image. It can be repositioned anywhere on the screen, and here it is shown above the notification area. The floating window will remember its location and will display there the next time that the application is started.

Another example of one of our ambient icons is called Moon Icons, and the corresponding icon images, tooltip text and floating window are shown here. Here we see that this one application is controlling two icons instead of just one. In this example, the current phase of the Moon is shown in the first icon, and a “moon phase calendar” in another icon. Each of these icons displays its own unique information, and some of our applications control five or more separate yet related icons!

Finally, since our ambient icons are small and require very few resources from your computer, several of them can be and are often run at the same time. The following screenshot is an example where over a dozen separate icons are all running at once, and each showing their own unique image:

The names of each of these 18 icon applications, from left to right, are:

Sprint Icon, Backup Pal, Memory Icon, Dice Icons, Roulette Icons, Magic 8-Ball Icon, Coin Flip Icon, Holiday Icon, Hourglass Icon, Keyboard Icons, PGA Calendar Icon, Sun Icon, Twilight Stars, Earth Icon, Mars Icons, Moon Icons, Tiny Clock 24, and finally Tiny Clocks.

These icons can, of course, be ordered in any way you desire, and the ones that you choose to show are only limited by your personal interests and tastes.

Clocks