That said, it's actually pretty complicated because of this simple question: how much time has passed since "Custom start year"?

For a custom year in the past, it's pretty easy to compute a difference between 1984 and 2009, and increase the star date in adequation.

But for a year in the future, as it was intended to, what should be used as a reference to the "real" current year?

Take the case where a user sets the "Custom start year" as "2323". …January, 1st 2323 should give [0]00000.0 in TNG star date. One year later the person should get [0]01000.0. That probably because the actual year "Custom start year" was set is recorded somewhere in the preferences file. But if someone loses that file, and relaunches the widget, he'll be back to custom year 2323, when he was at year 2325 instants before...

Plus some users may not want to drift off from the canon star date period (out of index 0), so if the custom current year changed with the real year, they would be unhappy too...

Bottom line is: the "Custom current year" setting is to display the actual star date for a given year. The star date system is a time reference system, and as such, it still has an unique begining point (January 4th, 2162 for TOS, January 1st, 2323 for TNG). So we can't start the star date system in any given time, because that date would be wrong.

I'll think about a way to implement a Custom current year that increments in time without making the widget too bloated... Maybe just a year count difference to consider when computing star dates, like "-25" for 1984 in 2009, so that widget would display the star dates for 1985 in 2010... More

The custom current year setting was introduced following a request to display a star date closer to the ones we see in the show, so that the current year could be 2383, no more, no less.

But I see that is some kind of bug to stay forever in that year, indeed. :)

I'll make the corrections and update the widget. Thanks for the heads-up (and sorry to reply so late...)!

Well Trek used a 4 digits star date system in the TOS era, and that was roughly 5 years until it reverted to 0000. So people suggested that star dates are probably indexed, so the star date system begins with the star date 0000.0, index 0, noted as [0]0000.0.

Every 5 years or so, when the star date counter reaches 9999.9 an reverts to 0000.0, the index count is increased: [1]0000.0.

Conveniently, TOS and TNG's tie window is on the 0th index, thus their star dates could be noted as [0]xxxx.…x and [0]xxxxx.x. But as we don't write 0033AD for the death of Christ, but 33AD, so do people in Trek: they write and say "star date 1234.1".

The index in the program is negative, because we're way before the start of the star date system. Then again we say 10000BC. ;)

And in theory the TNG star date system replaced the TOS system eventually, so we should be using TOS nowadays, but I find the TNG system more "scientific" and like it more, so I let people choose which to display (even both if you want). More

I feel like an idiot. The custom year is just that: a custom year.

Perhaps this could be changed to be a custom START year, so that the year will update properly?

Unfortunately, the year (the first two digits) doesn't update. I just realized that this thing has been stuck in the star year 61xxx (I used 1984 as the start year) for the last two years!