Horologe 1.0: what shipped
Horologe 1.0 is a desk clock for the Mac: four faces, five bells, the quarters or the counted hour, quiet hours from 10pm to 8am, about three and a half megabytes, $5.99 paid once, macOS 15 or later. This is the whole of it, kept as a record.
It's a window at desktop level — in front of the wallpaper, behind your windows — that never takes focus. You drag it where you want it and pull a corner to size it. The clock keeps your Mac's time; it doesn't keep a time of its own, and there's no account or server behind it.
The faces
Four, drawn in code rather than stored as images: Mantel, with a warm brass bezel, cream enamel dial, blued-steel hands and Roman numerals; Station, matte black with crisp white sans numerals and a red second hand; Chronometer, brushed steel with a guilloché dial and subsidiary seconds; Nocturne, dark ceramic with luminous indices. They're resolution-independent, so a dial is as sharp at ninety pixels between desktop icons as it is at five hundred on an external display. The tour of the four says which desk each one suits.
The bells
Five: Westminster plays the quarters and then counts the hour; Whittington plays the other great English change-ringing tune; Ship's Bell counts the nautical watch, one to eight; Temple Bowl is a single struck note with a long decay; Grandfather is a deep tolling strike, one for each hour. Only Westminster and Whittington play the quarters. The hour is counted out either way.
None of them is a recording. Each strike is computed the moment it sounds, from a bell's own partials, which is why no two strikes are quite alike and why the whole app weighs about three and a half megabytes. How the bells are made is the longer version.
The quiet
Quiet hours are on by default, silent from 10pm to 8am, and adjustable. The quarters can be turned off independently. Volume is a slider. Right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's silent from that moment, with the bell struck-through so you can see it. The clock keeps its face the whole time; it simply stops speaking.
What it can't do is notice. Horologe doesn't know you're on a call and never will, because knowing would mean watching your screen or listening at your microphone. That's why the mute is deliberately the easiest thing in the app. Quiet hours is the full explanation.
What wasn't built
No alarms, no timers, no world clocks, no ticking. No account, no subscription, no network calls, no permission prompts. The app reads the clock your Mac already keeps and does nothing else with it. Those absences are the shape of this version. A clock that strikes is a small object, and every addition would make it a different object.
If you want time zones, alarms or a timer, this isn't that app — and there are good ones. If you want a bell in the room, Horologe is $5.99 once. What the one-time price buys is the longer note on the price, and choosing a chime is where to start with the five.
Read next: Four faces: Mantel, Station, Chronometer, Nocturne