The New macOS Ventura Clock App

The Clock app brings four new functions to your Mac: World Clocks, Alarms, Stopwatch and Timers. You can also access timers and alarms with Siri, Spotlight or using the Shortcuts app.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at the Clock App in macOS Ventura. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
So a brand new app in macOS Ventura is the Clock App. It looks and acts just like the Clock App on the iPad and the iPhone. In fact, it is the same app. But finally we have this app and all its functionality on the Mac. So you launch it just like any other app. I'm going to use Spotlight to launch it and it will come up like this and it has four different sections that you can see at the top. 
The first section is called World Clock. Its whole purpose is just to show you the time at different locations around the world. So you can see different locations here on the map. You can see which locations are in daylight and which are in night. You can see the clocks for all of those there at the bottom. It even shows you sunrise and sunset times for those locations here. Now you can easily add locations by clicking the Plus button at the top right. Then you just type the name of the location. The database for locations is huge so changes are no matter how small the town it is still going to find it. You can just start the search and as soon as it's narrowed down enough you can select the location and it will add to the list and add itself to the map. You can continue to add locations, and they will continue to add to the list. Notice that you get a white clock for locations that are in the daytime and a black clock for locations that are at night. You can even go past the five slots here. When you do it just adds another row. You can rearrange these simply by dragging them around. If you want to remove one of these you can see there is a little x button right here and you could click to remove any clock you want. 
This is useful, of course, if you have friends and family in other time zones and you want to make sure you know the correct time before you message or call them. The same thing if you do business with people from around the world.
Next we have the Alarm section. So this allows you to set an alarm on your Mac which is something that I know a lot of users have been waiting for. Previously you needed a third party app to do this or you just had to use your iPhone to do it with the Clock App there. Now you can set alarms on your Mac. So to create an alarm just click the Plus button here and then enter a time and then you can set it to repeat on various days. So you can have it, say, repeat only on weekdays like that or have it repeat on all days of the week, or not have it repeat at all. Just have it do it that one time and then it will be turned off. You can create a label for this, so you can call it whatever you want and you can set the sound to play when the alarm goes off. Or you can set it to None to just get the notification. You can set whether or not Snooze is allowed. Then you can Save and you will see the alarm's listed here. If you want to remove one you can click the x button there. You can add as many as you like. You can switch them On and Off really easily. So if you commonly need to, say, set an alarm for 6:00 a.m. but you don't use it everyday you can Add an Alarm for 6:00 a.m.. You can set a sound, (sound playing), call it something, Save it, and then simply have it turned Off. When you need it when the time turns around again just turn it On. It will turn Off automatically once it plays. You can add as many of these as you like and you probably already know that if you use the Clock App on your iPhone to set alarms you can have a whole list of them. 
You can also use Siri to set alarms. (Speaking to siri - set an alarm for 8:00 a.m. Done.) So you can see how it is set here. You can even turn it Off in Siri right there before this goes away. If an alarm already exists Siri can activate it. (Turn on my 8:00 a.m. alarm. I turned on your 8:00 a.m. alarm. Delete my 8:00 a.m. alarm. I deleted your 8:00 a.m. alarm.) Note you can use Siri to create, activate, or delete alarms even if the Clock App isn't currently visible on the screen. Here's what happened when the alarm activates. You get the Notification there and in this case no sound was set to play so I didn't hear any sound but I still had that notification and I get these options here. Since I allowed Snooze for this I can set Snooze, now you can see how this is still there and active. 
So next we have the Stopwatch. So this allows you to track the time. You can start and you can see it starts counting up. You have elapse here so anytime you click the Lap Button it records the time and then continues the Stopwatch there. You can do that as many times as you want. Then you can Stop. Once you stop you can Reset or you can just Continue with it. You also have the ability to go to View and then change the Stopwatch to an analog version. Then you see it like that.
Finally we have Timers. Timers can be really useful for a variety of different things. You can easily start a Timer here just with the Start button. It gives you 5 minutes as the default but you can click in here and put anything that you want. So I can do, say, a 15 minute timer. Then you can start it and it starts counting down. Notice that with the Timer you also get the indicator here in the Menu Bar. So you can actually Quit the Clock App and you still get it up here. If you click on it, it launches the Clock App again and takes you right to the Timer. Now when the Timer is done it can play a sound. So you have these different sounds it can play. Also, at the bottom is Stop Playing. You can use a Timer to have the Music App stop the music that is currently playing. Kind of use it as kind of a sleep function. So you can have music playing and then set the Timer for 30 minutes and set it to stop playing and the Music App will stop. It should also work with the Podcast App and it may work with third party apps but you probably want to test it out first. You see not only the countdown here but the time at which this timer should finish. You can Pause the Timer when you want and then Resume it again. Note you've got this nice little circle here that is showing you how much time is left. You can click Done and it will just go back and remember the last time that you used. So if you commonly use 15 minutes for a timer it's going to remember that and you can just easily create a 15 minute timer. 
Now you can also use Siri for this.  (Speaking to Siri- Start a 5 minute timer. 5 minutes counting down.) You can see how you see that in the Clock App but you didn't have to have the Clock App even running for this to work. You also see it up here as well. Now it seems like you would have to go into the Clock App to pause it or finish the timer. But you can use Siri for this. (talking to Siri - Pause my timer. Paused. Resume timer. Resuming 4 minutes and 32 seconds starting now. Stop timer. It's canceled.). So in fact you can get all the Timer functionality using just Siri and then viewing it in the Menu Bar without the Clock App running at all. 
Also, another way to start a Timer is using Spotlight. If you go to Spotlight and you simply type Timer one of the Options here is Start Timer. Select that in Spotlight and then it will ask you for a time, so we can do say 15 and minutes and start. You can see the Timer is started here. It didn't even need to launch the Clock App. We can go and look at it and see that the timer is going. You can also type Alarm and there is an option here for Create Alarm. Use that and it is going to bring up this little interface here that allows you to create an alarm and then if we look in the Clock App we'll see that that alarm has been created. 
In the Shortcuts App we also have some new hooks for the Clock App. So if you look under Apps here and you search for Clock you'll see you've got Create Alarm, Get All Alarms, Open Tab which will allow you to select one of the tabs so you can just go right to the app and into a tab, Start Timer, and Toggle an Alarm which enables or disables that particular alarm. So some new stuff for those like to use the Shortcuts App. 
You should note that the Clock App also looks pretty good in Full Screen Mode. Here you see the World Clock full screen mode. You almost kind of want to leave that up instead of having to go to a screen saver. Also, the Timer looks good in Full Screen Mode. If you've got a stopwatch going that looks good in Full Screen Mode particularly if you use the analog stopwatch. 
So the Clock App is pretty simple but also pretty useful. I encourage you to give it a try. Look at the different functions and setup the World Clocks that you need and then remember the next time you need to set a timer or keep track of time with a stopwatch use the Clock App on your Mac instead of having to reach for your iPhone. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 5 Responses to “The New macOS Ventura Clock App”

Douglas Cooper

3 years ago

Can the clock be placed on the desktop?

Gary Rosenzweig

Douglas: No, but you can see the time already in the menu bar.

Mark Flannery

This was very helpful, thanks

Tim McLellan

2 years ago

Hi, i can't find a way to sync macOS clock with iPhone clock app Is there a way?

Tim: No. They are independent. Probably because people wouldn't like their office Mac sounding an alarm in the morning when they want to have that on their iPhone next to the bed.

Comments Closed.

The New macOS Ventura Clock App

Comments: 5 Responses to “The New macOS Ventura Clock App”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information