Indeed source isn't downloadable for a strange reason. I will upload later. As for the power consumption issue I believe the solution proposed by Estel to use proximityd is the way to go, but I have to finish some other things before I dive into it. Any help is of course welcome.

Timenow 0.0.2 should hit devel for real now.

I forgot however to bump the version, but I have changed it to use proximityd. Please test and report battery consumption.

The phone bug is not fixed yet, in fact I may need a little help there. I thought it would be enough to suppress timenow from displaying whenever the screen is both off and locked, but this is not sufficient. What other check should I run?

Checking if phone is running is not ok as it may well be in the background.
Checking if a call is active may be correct, but if the other party has hung up?

Sources are on http:://github.com/qwazix/timenow and hopefully now on the package system

It's about 7 mA. Better, but far from perfect.

I think I can set the polling interval to 200ms or even 500ms, what do you think?

200ms seems ok. What it is now?

100ms ..........

I'm not a programmer and I don't know how d-bus works, but AFAIK it does not require programs to poll itself and it can notify them if state changed, isn't that true?

Dbus does that, but the proximity sensor doesn't have this ability, so I am using proximityd a daemon written by the author of shortcutd which polls the proximity sensor by default every 100ms (but can be instructed to do so with a custom interval) and sends a signal to dBus, which then in it's turn notifies timenow to do it's thing.

qtMobility has a function to notify on proximity sensor changes but it doesn't seem to work on the N900 (using code that wirks on the N9). There should be a method to do that without polling using GPIO according to joergrw but I admit it's too low level for my taste.

@hxka: 7mA is for timenow only? How did you measure this?

But if this is overall standby discharge then I think this is quite good (the same as my rate without previous version of timenowd)

Have installed now. proximityd installed as well.

But no time shown on proximity change.What can i do?

@hxka: did it run on you device?