A grandfather clock for your Mac
Yes — Horologe is a grandfather clock for the Mac, with one qualifier worth saying first: it's the sound, not the furniture. It's $5.99, paid once, and its Grandfather voice is a single deep tolling strike, counted out, one for each hour.
The spec, in prose: four faces, five bells, quarters on or off, the hour counted out, quiet hours silent from 10pm to 8am, and a right-click on the bell in the menu bar to mute. About three and a half megabytes, macOS 15 or later, Mac App Store, one payment.
What the Grandfather voice is
Grandfather doesn't play a tune. It tolls — one strike on the hour, then a pause, then the next, up to twelve. It's the plainest of our five bells and the easiest to live with, which is why it's the one we suggest for a first week. There's no pendulum and no tick; if you want the mechanics of the real thing, the long case has its own piece, and how the strike is computed is another.
What a longcase clock is
A grandfather clock — clockmakers say longcase — is two clocks in one case. One keeps the time behind the dial; the other counts the hour out loud on its own gears, with its own weight pulling it. That second mechanism is the reason the sound exists at all. The dial was for whoever stood in front of it. The bell was for everyone else in the house.
That's the part a desktop clock can keep. You don't get the weights, the pendulum, the weekly winding, or the footprint in the hall. You get the strike, in a room that otherwise keeps the hour silently.
What you get instead
Four faces to choose from — Mantel, Station, Chronometer, Nocturne — and a window you can drag and resize anywhere on the desktop. It sits behind your work and in front of the wallpaper, so it's there when you look and out of the way when you don't. Grandfather is the plainest of the five voices: a toll, a pause, another toll, until the hour is counted out.
The honest limits
No alarms, no timers, no world clocks, and no pendulum tick. Westminster's quarter tune isn't part of this voice — Grandfather just tolls. It can ring during a call, because it can't tell a meeting from an empty room and won't ask to look. Right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's silent; quiet hours cover 10pm to 8am by default.
Horologe is $5.99 once. Pick Grandfather, hour only, volume low — the way a house with a longcase clock heard it.
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