An hourly bell for your Mac
Yes — Horologe rings an hourly bell on the Mac, and it's $5.99, paid once. What rings is a bell you choose from five, and it rings the hour the way a tower clock does: counted, one strike per o'clock.
The short spec: four faces, five bells, the quarters on or off, the hour counted out, quiet hours silent from 10pm to 8am, and a right-click on the menu-bar bell to mute. About three and a half megabytes, macOS 15 or later, Mac App Store, no subscription and nothing to renew.
What rings at the hour
Pick one of five voices. Westminster is the full ceremony. Whittington is its rounder English cousin. Ship's Bell counts the watch, one to eight. Temple Bowl is a single struck note with a long tail. Grandfather is one deep tolling strike for each hour — the plainest of the five, and the one we suggest for a first week.
At one o'clock you hear one strike. At twelve, twelve. There's no number to read and nothing to dismiss; the count is the message. If the quarters are on, they play before the hour: four notes, then eight, then twelve, then the hour itself. The quarters explained is where to go if you want to know what you're hearing.
Every strike is computed as it sounds, not played back from a recording, so the bell decays the way bronze does and no two strikes are quite the same. How the bells are made covers that in a few paragraphs.
Set it once
Install it, drag the clock where you want it, pick a bell and a face, and set it to launch at login. From then on it's out of your way: at desktop level, behind your windows, never taking focus. The whole app is one window and one menu-bar bell — there's no dashboard to visit and nothing to configure twice.
Hour only, or silent
If you want the bell and nothing else, turn the quarters off and the clock keeps the rest to itself. If you want silence — overnight, or through a run of meetings — quiet hours are already set to 10pm until 8am, and you can change them. Right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's silent immediately, with the icon marked so you can see it.
Two honest limits. It can't know you're on a call, so it might ring during one; muting it is deliberately one click. And it has no alarms and no timers — the bell marks the hour, it doesn't wake you at seven. If a spoken time is all you want, our how-to on chiming on the hour covers the system's free option too.
Horologe is $5.99 once. It rings the hour until you tell it not to.
Read next: A chiming clock app for the Mac