Sinic Lunar Calendar (SLC) for Mac

by Joseph C.H Chen

What it is...

Sinic Lunar Calendar is an implementation of the traditional lunar calendar used in East Asia (China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, etc.) It was also the official calendar in Japan until 19th century. I have intentionally avoided the word "Chinese," because it is simply not the whole story of this calendar. (Besides, since "The People's Republic of China" seems to want to monopolize the word "China/Chinese," it would be much safer to avoid the direct confrontation with them. Like we have humbly done to Microsoft.)

Is SLC Y2K Compliant...

Yes, it is. In fact, the year in SLC is represented by a long integer. So go figure in which range SLC should work :-). SLC is not addressing the need of an all-purpose tool for historical research. This is because traditional Sinic lunar calendar is not an arithmetical calendar but an astronomical one. What does this mean? It means that the traditional Sinic lunar calendar is always adjusted to important astronomical events, so it was always (and will always be) correct. Back to the time as the astronomical knowledge was not that developed as it is today, the lunar calendar used then might disagree with what SLC is calculated. So to recover every days in the past (in Sinic cultural realm), one has to have access to the calculation used by that time.

Where can I get it...

Please note that SLC is still in its beta-test phase and THERE IS NO WARRENTY OF ANY KIND. If you still decide to give it a try, you can get the latest version of SLC document from its main home page. Current version of SLC program is 1.0.2 and can be downloaded here. A traditional Chinese version of SLC can be downloaded here. For those who might be interested what traditional means, it means what is not used in China (PRC) but is used in almost all other Chinese communities. This is the second reason why I prefer Sinic to Chinese.

How can I use it...

The use of SLC should be quite straight-forward. A screen shot of SLC is shown below.

SHAREWARE

This software is SHAREWARE. If you use it longer than two weeks, you HAVE TO PAY. Afilliates of charity may use it free of charge. Please e-mail me with a plausible proof and I'll register you as a legal user and send you a registration code. The unregistered software is fully functional but might not have access to every date you input. :-) To register, please use the Register program coming along with SLC. You can also use Kagi's on-line processing system to register. Click here if your browser doesn't support Secure SSL.

Future of SLC..

This is roughly the To Do List:

Author..

SLC is written by Joseph Chen. Please e-mail me for bug report and/or suggestions.