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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution Pick of the Week
Calendarclock iconThe macosxhints Rating:
9 of 10
[Score: 9 out of 10]
Having the date and time in the menubar clock is an often-requested hack for OS X -- there have been a number of hints about how to do this, as well as a previous Pick of the Week (iClock). Here's yet one more, this time by Peter Maurer, author of my all-time-fave utility, Butler. Calendarclock is a simple application that places the time and date (or some combo thereof) in the menubar when it's running.

Calendarclock puts nearly any version of date and time in your menubar that you'd like to see -- it uses the syntax from the Unix strftime command to display a format of your choice (with a number of pre-defined options). Do a man strftime in the Terminal and you'll see the various formatting options available. After some experimenting, I settled on %a %b %e %1I:%M%p, which leads to a date/time display of Mon Aug 2 9:03am (I'm usually alert enough to know the current year).

In addition to the date/time display, Calendarclock will display a full-month calendar when you click on the date/time in the menubar, as seen at left. The pop-up menu at top lets you change the month shown, or you can use the small arrows below the calendar. If you double-click a date in the calendar, iCal opens with that date selected. Below the calendar, the selected day's iCal entries are shown (they can be hidden by clicking the circular three-line icon). Alternatively, you can use the preferences to display the entire month's iCal events, but such a list will tend to be quite long. And yes, I do have Kylie's pick-up time scheduled, mainly so I get a reminder that I need to go pick her up! The circular down-arrow icon lets you donate, open Calendarclock's preferences, and launch iCal or the Date & Time preferences panel.

There are obviously other tools that do this, including the previously-discussed iClock and wClock, but I prefer Calendarclock. The only reason it lost a point at all is that it cannot be moved from the top-right corner of the menubar, and I'd prefer to have something else in that corner. However, this is a minor quibble, and the flexibility of Calendarclock more than makes up for it.
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  • Currently 1.75 / 5
  You rated: 5 / 5 (8 votes cast)
 
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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution | 24 comments | Create New Account
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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: jctull on Aug 02, '04 12:53:23PM

This morning's update adds the ability to move the clock out of the far-right corner.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: icerabbit on Aug 02, '04 01:45:44PM

Correct. Was going to mention the same thing.

Lovely little app!



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: robg on Aug 02, '04 01:55:30PM

Sheez, I sleep for a day, and look what I miss :).

Change that 9 to a 10!

-rob.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: Han Solo on Aug 02, '04 04:05:22PM
Err, back to a 9... or an 8: you cannot toggle between "To Do", iCal Events and no iCal drop-down in the calendar view â€" only between 2 of the 3.

Also, the "Mini Calendar" is OK, but better (IMHO) would be the ability to briefly toggle to today's date rather than drop down the calendar, or to show today's date below the menu bar while one mouses over the time â€" as PTHClock used to do.

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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Aug 02, '04 04:07:49PM

Yes you can... hold the Option key, and then click on the To Do/Event button. Now it will toggle on and off. Once open, just Option/Click to toggle between To do and Event



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: Han Solo on Aug 02, '04 05:11:12PM

<sarcasm>Well, that was intuitive!</sarcasm> Fair enough, 'though: the option key does work as you say, and I appreciate that insight.

Nonetheless, I'd still prefer to be able to rotate through three views simply by clicking: (1) no iCal view, (2) iCal events (3) iCal "To Do". And I'd still like to see an easy way to view the day and date.

I still would give it an 8 or 9, which is still quite good in my book.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: mmmmark on Aug 02, '04 06:48:07PM

Try this little gem called MenuCalendar. It is more like PTHClock IMHO (before they sold out to the big, bad corporate weenies). I'm still using version 1.8 and it is the best I've seen.

http://www.objectpark.net/mc.html



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: markymark on Aug 03, '04 05:55:00AM

Both of these apps (Calenderclock and MenuCalendar) are nice - but does anyone know of an easy way to get two times in the menu bar (one local one other time zone) - I used to use PTHclock for this but it is alas no longer donationware and it also has a tendency to dissapear periodically from my menu bar (conflict with Butler?).



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: gadg on Aug 03, '04 06:49:50AM

I've used MenuCalender in the past, seems like they have improved the app a lot! The interface of MenuCalender is much better than CalenderClock imho. However: it add's yet another icon to my menubar, the power of CC was that it doesn't do that. And also, MC is not entirely free - it seems CC has options I pay for in MC.

---
the difference between men and boys, is the price of their toys



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Aug 03, '04 08:32:22AM

Re: MenuCalendar. I was using MC up until I tried out Calendarclock... although the first release was missing some of the things I liked about MC, the current release has everything I need.

First I used CalendarDock. Then I was a PTHClock user, which I loved. What I like about Calendarclock is it's also the menubar clock, so it takes up less space on my menubar - which is already pretty crowded!

But choice is a good thing! I think this is the first time in a long while that there has been so many fine utilities available for OS X!

I say let's give all the developers a big hand (and a contribution)!

:)



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Aug 03, '04 08:23:55AM

I have to admit I discovered it by accident! I was also wondering how to hide the list pane... When in situations like this I always try modifier keys!

I agree a separate button would be nicer.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: JoeGrind on Aug 02, '04 04:06:25PM

Any idea why the text isn't anti-aliased? It certainly is a nice little app though.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: DavidRavenMoon on Aug 02, '04 04:09:12PM

The text is anti-aliased on my Mac.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: Han Solo on Aug 02, '04 05:13:32PM

Same here: no problem with anti-aliased text.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: Chris Biagini on Aug 02, '04 06:01:11PM
It's only gently anti-aliased. Compare it to other text on your system.

For some odd reason, SystemUIServer doesn't support sub-pixel rendering, but even still, text is usually smoothed more than it is in Calendarclock.

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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: joshuajabbour on Aug 02, '04 09:26:51PM

I think it's a basic problem in both Butler and Calendarclock. The text in a iTunes info window in Butle isn't antialiased either. Actually, it looks like crap. Try making the window transparent and switching text to white to see what I mean. I hope Peter improves the text display, because it'll look tons better...



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Calendarclock enhancements...
Authored by: roncross@cox.net on Aug 02, '04 04:24:06PM

There is already an update to the 1st version. The most notably being able to automatically hide Calendarclock after a specified number of second - very nice!!! I have mine set to 10 sec. Other enhancements are the ability to move the menubar clock from left, far right, to launch order - good feature addition. The option to show the to do list or not is quite a nice feature as well. There is also a mini iCal icon option that you can select to toggle CalendarClock to show in the menu bar. In addition, you can show the ical events for a single day or month. All of these choices is keeping in the spirit of Peter's work to give the users the ability to configure the application anyway they like.

Knowing Peter's work, I am sure that there will be another version coming out very soon that will add Butler smart items to these enhanced features. I tried putting the CalendarClock in the far right position with the updated version, but I have seem to have lost this ability; it was the default position in the 1st version. The CalendarClock appears to be left justified to the menubar calendar. It would be nice if there were CalendarClock options to make it left, center, right justified with respect to the menubar calendar so that I can put the calendar in the far right corner if I choose to move it there.

thx
RLC

---
rlc



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: restiffbard on Aug 02, '04 05:46:02PM

This is just one of those nifty apps that you didn't know you needed. Thanks all for pointing it out.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: maddys_daddy on Aug 03, '04 01:08:11AM

Yeah, there are a few different mini-calendar apps out there, but for me, the feature that makes this one stand head and shoulders above the rest is it's ability to diplay iCal events AND to-do's, and without even opening iCal (like the stupid Konfabulator widget I've been using). VERY NICE. Now when I graduate college and start making the big bucks ( ;)~ ), I'll send Peter some money. I've been a happy butler user since it was called Application Launcher (or whatever it was called before he changed the name to butler).



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Suggestions for improvement
Authored by: gadg on Aug 03, '04 06:52:58AM

I like the way the calender and schedule are seperated in MenuCalender, but whatever - stacked is fine too.

The schedule part could do with some formatting options, for instance:

- Use iCal coloring
- Sort by time or by color
- Display start-time only
- Cut to use one line only (10:00 Technology disc...)

---
the difference between men and boys, is the price of their toys



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: whoadoggy on Aug 03, '04 10:56:17AM

While I like this app and think the iCal integration is cool, on my machines, ALL the ToDo's are listed, even old, completed ones. Anyone else see this or know a work-around?



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: flo_muc on Aug 03, '04 11:46:35AM

Hm, IMHO this app only reads meetings/tasks at startup.
Which I could set a refresh interval..



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: jemimap on Aug 03, '04 12:25:38PM

I saw the same thing--a completed ToDo item. I thought it was a problem with my calendar so I deleted the old item from the .ics file. I'm using 10.3.4 on a 12" PowerBook G4. I think that newly completed ToDo items don't show up.



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Calendarclock - Another menubar date/time solution
Authored by: cudaboy_71 on Aug 05, '04 03:05:17PM

the following also only affects my 12" pb....my cinema display does not display the following behavior:

with unsanity's windowshade active, the text in the menubar has a large, ugly shadow around it. to remove, simply add calendarclock to windowshade's 'exclude list'.

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if it aint broke, break it!



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