The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: Peter Maurer / Product page
  
• Price: Donationware

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.