Clock, right on the Touch Bar

I have been using a MacBook with Touch Bar for last 1.5 years and I have always loved it. I personally feel that touchbar is a cool idea. Apart from the in-built features which Apple provides though touchbar, I have always felt that a lot of cool things can be done through it. There are, though, very less number of useful apps for touchbar. So, I thought of giving it a try to build something useful.

For me, it takes a lot of effort to check the time from the menu bar. Also, when you are working in full screen mode, time is what you are missing the most. The clock on the touchbar feels so perfectly and strategically placed. You do not have to put any effort for checking the time. It’s right there, always in the front.

Developing the app

One floating button —

There is only one floating button which Apple provides for touchbar. One custom button and four fixed buttons is all you have. I have used the custom one for displaying time. For hooking up this button, I referred to this repository.

Open at login —

I referred to this link for how to launch a completely sandboxed macOS application on system startup.

enabling autologin on startup

Clickable textfields —

Using clickable text fields for changing different colour.

It was my first experience trying out building a MacBook app. Built it in a night’s time. I could not find any other MacBook around me with touchbar, so could not test it on a different system. However, I tested the auto login, hiding the icon from menubar on a couple of macs, worked perfectly fine.

Options:

• Tap to change the time format.
• Change colours (Just for fun).
• Open at login. (change in preference)

Github Repository: Clock Bar (Do not shy away from giving a star *)

Download: Here

What do you think about this app? Please leave comments. Thanks for passing by. Cheers!!!