A chiming clock app for the Mac
Yes — Horologe is a chiming clock app for the Mac, and it's $5.99, paid once. It lives on the desktop, in front of the wallpaper and behind your windows, and it marks the hour with a bell.
The whole specification, in prose: four faces — Mantel, Station, Chronometer, Nocturne. Five bells — Westminster, Whittington, Ship's Bell, Temple Bowl, Grandfather. Quarters on or off; the hour counted out, one strike per o'clock. Quiet hours silent from 10pm to 8am, and a right-click on the bell in the menu bar to mute everything at once. It weighs about three and a half megabytes, needs macOS 15 or later, and comes from the Mac App Store.
What a chiming clock actually does
A chiming clock does two jobs, and Horologe keeps them separate. With the Westminster or Whittington bell, the quarter hours play a short phrase: four notes at a quarter past, eight at half past, twelve at a quarter to. On the hour it's sixteen notes, and then the hour counted out — one strike for one o'clock, two for two, up to twelve. That's the real sequence, the one tower clocks have used for centuries, not a shortened jingle. The other three voices don't do quarters at all: Ship's Bell counts the nautical watch, Temple Bowl is a single struck note, and Grandfather just tolls. Our piece on the Westminster Quarters is the long version of where those notes come from.
None of the bells is a recording. Each strike is computed the moment it sounds, from a bell's own partials, so no two are exactly alike and the sound decays the way metal does rather than stopping dead. How that works is its own short piece.
On the desk
It's a window at desktop level, not a menu-bar readout and not a screen saver. You drag it where you want it and pull a corner to size it up to something you can read across the room. Choose one of the four faces — brass-and-cream Mantel, black-and-white Station, brushed-steel Chronometer, dark Nocturne — and it wears that face on your desk afterwards. It never takes focus and never comes to the front of your work.
What it doesn't do
No alarms, no timers, no world clocks, and no ticking. It can ring during a call — it can't see your screen, read your calendar or hear your microphone, and it won't ask to. That's the trade you're making: a clock that's deaf to your meeting, and easy to hush. Right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's silent from that moment; quiet hours cover the same stretch every night without you thinking about it.
If you want a chime at a moment you choose, this isn't that app. If you want a room that keeps the hour, Horologe is $5.99 once. Our advice for the first week is the same as it always is: Grandfather, hour only, volume low. The quarters are lovelier when you've earned them.
Read next: How to make your Mac chime every hour