How To Add a Clock To Your Mac Desktop

You can use a variety of apps to add a live clock to your Mac's desktop wallpaper background. Each app has it own style, features and settings.

Check out How To Add a Clock To Your Mac Desktop at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's look at how to put a clock on your Desktop wallpaper. 
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So I know a lot of people like to put a clock on their Desktop background. In order to do this you're going to need a third party app. There are many in the Mac App Store. So here's a look at some that get the best rating. So first let's take a look at one called Desktop Clock +. There's actually two. The other one is Desktop Clock Live. That's free with an in-app purchase. So you can kind of try it out. I just went ahead and bought Desktop Clock + to get all the functionality right up front. So when you start you get this clock here on your Desktop and you get some help information. Just go right into Preferences here and we can see there's a bunch of different clock styles that we can choose from. Let's go to the digital clock style which I know a lot of people like. So under clock I can change position by clicking Click & Drag. Then I can click this and drag it around to where I want. It's kind of frustrating that I can't automatically center it though. I could also adjust the size here. This is the largest it gets but by largest means it's not going to quite fill the screen. You can make it semi-transparent if you like. You can have it always on top which means other windows will actually go behind it. This, of course, would be more useful if you make it small and put it in one corner. Notice if I move my cursor over it it goes away. So you can still get to things behind it. 
So under General there are a few more things. For instance you can have it automatically jump to the top if there's a period of inactivity. You can set a hot corner for it to move on top. You can Hide the icon in the Dock if you'd rather not see it down there. Note here you've got in the Menu Bar Start at Login which you're going to want to turn on if just want this to be automatically running.
Next let's look at ClockDesk. Now prices change in the Mac App Store all the time. But the previous app and this one are both priced at $2.99 at the moment. Here you get a clock that just goes right over the screen and it blurs the background. You get a Menu Bar item up here and you can control things. So you can set it to Launch at Login. You can change the background blur so if you don't want it to blur the background at all you could turn that off. You could size to make it larger or smaller. I like that you can change the horizontal and vertical position and it snaps to center there. So for instance I could have it appear at the bottom of the screen if I wanted to or at the top. I could have it be semi-transparent. I can also make it appear always on top. So here I have a TextEdit window and you can see the clock is always on top of it. I can turn off or change the date display, the time display. Then I can select any font I want. So here I can go and choose from all the different fonts I have. Make it look at little different. Customize it a little bit. You can also change the color as well and whether or not there is a shadow underneath.
So next let's look at iSmartClock also $2.99. So you get a Welcome Screen here. So notice this is a small clock here that is a particular style. It's a circle and the line fills with each second. You get the Day, the Date, and of course the Time in analog form. By default it appears on top of things. But it doesn't get in the way because as soon as you move your cursor there it Hides itself. Now the way you deal with changing it or moving it around is you hold the Command key down and you move the cursor there. Then it won't Hide itself and you can click and drag it and move it wherever you want. You can also click here and go to Preferences. Now you can set it to start at login. Set some Keyboard Shortcuts. Change the Appearance so you can change the color of things. Have the digital time appear in there instead of analog. Automatically center it. You can increase its size quite a bit. You can make it mostly transparent if you want to.
Now the next one is a little more specialized. This is called Living Earth and it actually won Apple's Editor Choice Aware so I definitely wanted to check it out. But it's a little more expensive. It's now $6.99. So when you first launch it you don't actually get the Desktop by default. What you do get is you get weather and temperature up here and you can click there and then you could see the earth and it actually shows things like the proper side lit and also live clouds. You can go here to Settings, Preferences, and here you can actually enable this for the Desktop as well. So we'll turn that on and now you can see it turns the whole Desktop into this. Now it's nice to be able to see what the earth would look like from space at the moment but what we're talking about here is Clocks. So you want to use Display Time and Weather. You can see that information displayed here. Of course you can change the city and you can also turn this into a screen saver rather than using it as a Desktop Wallpaper.
Now I also came across a series of different apps from one developer. This particular one is called Mechanical Clock 3D Lite. It's a free version. The paid version allows you to customize it more. This looks pretty cool here. You could see it up here. You can easily hide it and you can also go to Preferences here and set some things. So you can increase the graphics quality. Add ticking sounds and a few other things. Notice here it shows you a few things about AC power mode and battery mode because as you can guess something like this will use up a bit of your battery. As a matter of fact all of these will use up a little bit of your battery. I mean after all it's going to be changing the Desktop every second. So you probably don't want to use any of these if you're concerned about battery life on a MacBook. But that doesn't really matter if you have a Desktop Mac or if you're only going to use it while your Mac is plugged in anyway.
So now if you see somebody with a Mac and you notice that their wallpaper has a live clock on it you know how they do it. If you want one of these you could find them all in the Mac App Store plus a few others listed there as well.

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Add a Clock To Your Mac Desktop”

nick

11 months ago

hey Gary, I miss the dashboard widgets we used to have in Sierra, lots of useful stuff in there and a clock as well. Any idea why they got rid of them? thx

Gary Rosenzweig

nick: I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think many people used the old Dashboard Widgets, and they wanted to replace them with the current method. There is a clock widget in the Notifications Center if you like that.

Gary: in Mac OS is the Notification Center on the upper right-hand corner?

nick: Right. In Catalina when you click that, you get Notifications or Today. Today shows widgets. At the bottom you can go to Edit and add a Clock widget. In Big Sur it is combined into one view and the Clock widget is better.

Robert

7 months ago

Thanks for the tips.

Gus Soj

4 months ago

Hi Gary, do you happen to know a terminal script/tutorial to pin the international clock on desktop for Big Sur? I use it all the time and it is really annoying to have to scroll the widgets down every time.

Gus: Widgets work in that space only. You can’t have it display elsewhere. I’d look for an app that displays a clock on your desktop or in the menu bar instead.

How To Add a Clock To Your Mac Desktop

Comments: 7 Responses to “How To Add a Clock To Your Mac Desktop”

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