Clockee: a world clock in the corner of my screen

Table of Contents

Why I built it
What Clockee does
Speed and footprint
How it's built
- Gotchas worth knowing
- The agent interface
How it was built
- Next
Further reading

Clockee is the world clock on my Mac. It's a small card in the bottom-right corner of 1 display, above every window, on every Space. It shows my own time in large type and my next meeting with the client's local time. A click opens the time in the 4 places I work with: Israel, the UK, the East Coast and the West Coast.

Clockee replaces no app. The macOS menu bar clock stays where it is. I built Clockee with Claude Code: version 1.0 shipped on 28th October 2026. The app is 1 MB on disk and uses 14 MB of memory. The name follows the -ee family of my tools.

The screenshots in this note come from QA, with a fake clock and a fake meeting.

The Clockee card in dark mode with its places open: Israel 13:00 +1 h and UK 11:00 -1 h in full white, Toronto East 07:00 -5 h and West Coast 04:00 -8 h in grey because they are outside working hours, and the local time 12:00 in large type at the bottom with a red bar and WED

Why I built it

My week runs on 4 time zones. Before every call I did the same sum in my head: what time is it for them, are they still at work, is it a holiday there. The menu bar clock shows 1 time zone. A desktop widget sits under my windows, and I never see my desktop.

I wanted 3 things in 1 glance, without a click:

My time, large enough to read from across the desk.
My next meeting, with a countdown and the time for the client.
Who is at work: working hours, their own weekend, their public holidays.

Before the build, the agent reviewed 90 days of my calendar history, my displays and my window manager. 1 round of 29 questions set the design.

What Clockee does

The card

The card sits flush in the corner of my main display. Top to bottom:

Row	Shows	When
Next meeting	Start time, subject, "in 25 min", and the client's local time	A meeting in the next 12 h
Countdown	Time left until a deadline another tool writes	A countdown file is set
Places	Label, time, offset from me ("+1 h"), or the weekday when the date differs	After a click on the card
My time	Large, no label, a red bar on the left and the weekday on the right	Always

30 Oct 2026 The places are now hidden until I click the card, and a 2nd click hides them again. Version 1.0 showed them all the time, let clicks pass through to the window under it, and faded when the pointer came near. The closed card is smaller, which matters more than a click saved. A click still never takes the focus from the app I work in.

The closed Clockee card in dark mode: a fake meeting Acme quarterly business review at 14:00, in 1 h, 13:00 UK, above the local time 13:00 in large type and WED

Working hours and holidays

Each place has its own working days, start and end times, and holiday calendars. A place outside working hours turns grey. A place on a public holiday gets a red dot after its label.

Code	Holidays
`uk`	England and Wales bank holidays, with substitute days
`us`	9 federal holidays and the day after Thanksgiving
`ca-on`	Ontario statutory holidays, with substitute days
`il`	Rosh Hashanah to Shavuot, from Foundation's Hebrew calendar

The holidays come from rules in code, for any year, offline. No data file to go stale, no network. Israel's weekend is Friday and Saturday, so its work week starts on Sunday. A place with 2 calendars, like the East Coast with Ontario and the US, stays at work when only 1 of them has a holiday and gets the red dot.

The client's local time

Clockee reads my next meeting from a local calendar database that another tool syncs every hour. It skips declined, cancelled, all-day and focus blocks, and events I'm alone in.

For each external email domain in the meeting, Clockee guesses the client's country: the top-level domain first (.uk, .il, .ca), then my company database. It then shows the first time zone that differs from mine, for example "13:00 UK". The countdown turns red 5 minutes before the start.

The countdown

1 row counts down to any deadline that another tool writes to a JSON file. I use it for my work sign-in session: a script keeps the session alive and writes its expiry, and the row turns red in the last hour and says "sign in" when the session has ended. Clockee only reads the file, so it stays generic.

The 1-line strip

The first design was a 1-line strip along the bottom of the screen. I switched to the card on day 1, but the strip stays as an option:

The horizontal Clockee strip in dark mode: the local time 00:30 THU, then Israel 01:30 +1 h, UK 23:30 Wed, Toronto East 19:30 Wed and West Coast 16:30 Wed, separated by thin lines

Speed and footprint

Clockee has no old app to beat, so the spec set budgets and QA fails when one breaks:

Bar chart of Clockee against its own budgets: memory 13.6 MB of a 30 MB budget, CPU at rest 0.11% of 0.2%, launch to card drawn 221 ms of 300 ms, and 1 redraw 0.04 ms of 2 ms

The app I ran overnight used 31.8 s of CPU time in 7 h 43 min. That's 0.11% on average, with a memory footprint of 14 MB.

The rules that keep it there are in the spec:

1 timer, re-armed on each minute boundary from the wall clock. No repeating timer that drifts.
Redraw on events only: the minute tick, wake, a clock change, a time zone change, a new day, a display change, a settings change, a new meeting.
The main thread never touches the disk. Settings, state and the calendar load on a background queue.
The calendar is read at most once a minute, with a 200 ms busy timeout. A locked file keeps the last meeting and never blocks.
The panel never becomes key and never activates the app.

Correct beats fast. A clock that is 1 hour wrong once is worse than no clock, so QA checks the offsets and weekdays across the daylight saving weeks, and Clockee redraws within 1 s of a wake.

How it's built

Swift 6.3 and AppKit, 1 view drawn by hand. No SwiftUI.
1 borderless, non-activating NSPanel at status-bar level: above normal and floating windows, below menus and Alfred. It joins every Space and stays out of ⌘Tab and Mission Control.
Foundation TimeZone for the time zones, so daylight saving is automatic.
Futura for a Bauhaus look, with Lato as the fallback. Any installed font works.
No Dock icon, no menu bar icon, no permissions. A bundled login agent restarts it after a crash, in about 3 s.
Settings in 1 JSON file with comments, reloaded live.
No dependencies.

Gotchas worth knowing

isFloatingPanel = true resets the window level to floating. Set the status-bar level after it.
macOS 15 and later ignore sharingType = .none for ScreenCaptureKit, so Clockee shows in screenshots. Leaving it out of Shotee: my own screenshot app for the Mac and Recordee: my own screen and camera recorder, after 10 years of OBS captures is on the version 2 list.
Tilee: my own tiling window manager in Hammerspoon must never tile it. Clockee is in Tilee's list of floating apps.

The agent interface

Every command takes --json, so NicAI can use Clockee inside a task (see What is NicAI). The calendar skill can use clockee at to propose times across my places:

clockee status --json                    # each place's time, offset and status
clockee at 16:00 --json                  # 16:00 here, in every place
clockee at 09:00 --from Toronto --json   # 09:00 in Toronto, here and everywhere
clockee next --json                      # the meeting on the card, with the client's time
clockee places toggle --json             # open or close the places
clockee hide 30 --json                   # hide the card for 30 minutes

clockee status works when the app isn't running: it computes the times from the settings with Python's zoneinfo.

How it was built

Clockee followed my appee process for apps:

Usage review: 90 days of calendar history, the displays, the window manager and the other apps.
Questions: 29, each with a recommended answer, answered on 28th October 2026.
Spec, build and QA: version 1.0 the same day. An independent review found 13 defects, all fixed. 2 examples: deleted calendar events showed as meetings, and clockee at used today's offset, so other dates were 1 hour off across daylight saving.
Changes from use: on day 1, the vertical card and Futura. On 29th October, the countdown. On 30th October, the places behind a click.

QA today: 19 unit tests and 110 end-to-end checks in 6 suites. QA runs the real app with a fake clock, fake displays and a fixture calendar, and renders the card off screen. It never touches my real screen, calendar or pointer.

Version 2 candidates: shift the times by scrolling over the card, a daylight saving alert, the time for the person on a call, and a Stream Deck key with the times.