Filed under: OS, Tips and tricks, Mods
Date and time in your menu bar
The folks at Creative Bits are at it again. Last month, they posted a trick for changing the displays icon in your Mac's menu bar. Today, blogger Ivan posts his trick for getting both the time and date to display in the menu bar. He writes:"First you have to open System Preferences/ International and choose the Formats tab. If you click customize at Times you will find several formats of time that can be customized: short, medium, long, full...Here you can simply drag and drop the Time elements from below to create your custom time format."
Next, he does the same in the Date control panel, copying the line that he altered. After that, it's simply a matter of reopening window for customizing the Time display and pasting the date line in. Pretty cool.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Kurt Vander Bogart said 10:28PM on 12-02-2005
Nice. I've been wanting to do this for awhile. I hope it dosen't disappear in the next OS release.
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Kasei said 12:26AM on 12-03-2005
I finally got it to work. This is pretty cool. I have been looking for something like this for a while.
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David Schultz said 12:44AM on 12-03-2005
Kudos to Creative Bits for their hack.
You might first try out wClock. A lot of menubar functionality and it's free. Works really well.
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13297
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greycat said 3:23AM on 12-03-2005
I did it as told, be see no changes? must I maybe reboot?
thanks for the help
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Martyn said 6:30AM on 12-03-2005
I can't seem to get this to work. I followed the instructions to the letter, but like greycat above it doesn't change anything I still just see Sat 09:16 for example.
Any clues anyone?
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Clarus said 5:51AM on 12-03-2005
Hm. Look at this entry on MacOSXHints.com from May 18 '05: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050508000838365&query=menubar
"Start by opening the International Preferences panel, and clicking the Formats tab. In the Dates section, click Customize. ..."
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Klian said 6:22AM on 12-03-2005
Nice enhancement :)
Thanks
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Michael May said 7:31AM on 12-03-2005
Love it! This also changes the date stamp in Adium, which is brilliant too, as you can instantly tell when your previous conversations were (When i start a new conversation, the last 5 messages appear from the previous conversation with that person) and also what date it is (the top of the screen is a long way away, ok?)
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ABC said 7:44AM on 12-05-2005
Works like a charm.
Need to make sure you adjust the format size to med. format!
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J.Stone said 10:23AM on 12-03-2005
Anyone know if this will stick between restarts, or will it need to done each time machine starts up? I works great for me. I appreciate the tip...
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Julien Collot said 11:00AM on 12-03-2005
OK, I tried a few things, and I can give everyone a few details (and improved tips) as to how this works.
First thing, you have to modify the "Medium" length setting for the time, otherwise nothing will work.
Then, the cool part. OS X uses Unix Standard (I think) notation for date/time formats, i.e., the following notation : "Sat, Dec 3 2005, 5:00 PM" is actually made up of replacements to the string "EEE, MMM d yyyy, h:mm a".
For advanced editing, you just need to type these strings in the field instead of drag and dropping elements, and there you have it, magical formating customized to your own needs ! If you need more info as to how an element is coded by Mac OSX, just click the element, copy it, post it into TextEditor, and there it is...
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Vikesh said 11:50AM on 12-03-2005
very nice trick, thank you! i've always wondered why the date would not appear.
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Thriller said 12:53PM on 12-03-2005
When I try and do this GMT appears on the menu bar after time and the date is not displayed. I have tried all the tricks explained above restarting etc. Could some one help me? Thanks in advance. Cheers
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Julien Collot said 1:13PM on 12-03-2005
I had that problem the first time I tried editing the format... I tried again and got it working though...
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Steve P said 2:22PM on 12-03-2005
Seems to be a Tiger-only hack as the listed choices just aren't there in 10.3.9
Just a suggestion, but can this be mentioned in future? This is about the third cool hack that I have looked at from your links that turned out to be Tiger-specific.
Maybe I'm the only holdout, but I am waiting to find something in Tiger worth $100 to me...
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John Henry Brown said 10:02PM on 12-03-2005
I'll add my vote for turning off Apple's time and date display and putting wClock in your startup items. It just works, and has a pop-up calendar as well.
http://www.wolfware.com/wClock.html
Why do people link to macupdate or versiontracker instead of the actual web site of the product they are talking about?
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Jonesy said 10:58AM on 12-04-2005
WARNING! This hack can play havoc with iCal. If you have used it - go look at iCal just to make sure it's not impacted in a negative way for you (I had to reset due to it's alterations).
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drbadass said 12:55AM on 12-12-2005
I had a lot of trouble with this initially. But the comments in here are accurate. I had success editting the Medium format of the Times section. But if you've tried and haven't gotten results, you can reset the formats in the Region drop down and try again. Once I reset and tried again, it worked fine. Also, using Unix date format speeds things up, thanks to Julien Collot.
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