# Horologe > A striking desk clock for macOS. Four faces drawn in code, five bells computed from a bell's own partial ratios the moment they sound — Westminster quarters, the hour strike counted out, quiet hours. $5.99, paid once, on the Mac App Store. No permissions, no network calls, no account, no subscription. This file is the complete text of tryhorologe.com, as of 27 August 2026. The short version is at https://tryhorologe.com/llms.txt. The specification card's weight is the app on disk; the App Store download is smaller. ## The clock https://tryhorologe.com/ Nobody sent it. It's just three o'clock. A desk clock for your Mac. It marks the quarters, strikes the hour, and otherwise keeps to itself. - macOS 15 or later. On the Mac App Store. - Silent from 10 pm until 8 am. A right-click on the bell hushes it. ### Four faces. Take the one your desk asks for. Press one. The clock wears it for the rest of the page, and on your desk afterwards. - **Mantel** — Brass and cream enamel. Roman numerals. - **Station** — Matte black, heavy batons, a red sweep hand. - **Chronometer** — Brushed steel, guilloché, subsidiary seconds. - **Nocturne** — Dark ceramic, luminous indices, for night desks. Every face is drawn in code, sharp at any size. The clock on this page is the clock you get. ### Five bells. Press one. - **Westminster** — The quarters, then the hour. The real tune. - **Whittington** — Change-ringing on four, on a sweeter bell. - **Ship's Bell** — The nautical watch system, one to eight bells. - **Temple Bowl** — A struck standing bowl. Long, warm, beating. - **Grandfather** — The chime rods of a longcase clock. Our honest advice for the first week: hour strike only, volume low. ### The specification card **Horologe** — *n.* — a timepiece; any instrument for telling the hour. - Version: 1.0 (1), com.tryhorologe.app - Faces: four, drawn in SwiftUI. - Bells: five, by modal synthesis. - Level: desktop — in front of your wallpaper, behind your windows. - Materials: none. - Weight: 3,552 KB — about 3.5 MB. - Permissions: none. Network: none. Account: none. - Price: $5.99, paid once. ### Three o'clock is coming either way. You'll spend the afternoon at this screen regardless. The only question is whether anything marks it. Nothing renews, nothing expires, nothing phones anywhere for permission to ring. Apple takes the payment; we never see a card. ## What you get https://tryhorologe.com/buy.html ### One payment, and then it's yours. $5.99, paid once. Nothing renews, nothing expires, and nothing phones anywhere for permission to ring. **Horologe 1.0** — a striking desk clock for macOS. - Faces: four — Mantel, Station, Chronometer, Nocturne. - Bells: five — Westminster, Whittington, Ship's Bell, Temple Bowl, Grandfather. - Quarters: four notes, eight, twelve, sixteen — then the hour, counted out. On, or off. - Quiet hours: yours to set. Silent from 10 pm until 8 am out of the box. - Requires: macOS 15 or later. - Weight: about three and a half megabytes. - Permissions: none. Network: none. Account: none. Subscription: none. - Price: $5.99, paid once. [Buy for Mac — $5.99 once](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6796512695) — opens the Mac App Store. Apple takes the payment; we never see a card. ### What happens next You pay Apple, the app comes down, and it's on your desktop in about forty seconds. There's no account to make, no key to keep and no email to confirm. Drag it where you want it, pull a corner until it's the size of a real clock across a real room, and pick the bell you liked upstairs. Put it somewhere you can see it — the next quarter is already on its way. ### One thing to know before you pay Horologe can't see your screen, read your calendar or hear your microphone, so it can't tell a meeting from an empty room, and it can ring in the middle of a call. That's why hushing it is the easiest thing in the app: right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's silent, with no panel to open first. Quiet hours cover the same stretch of every day without you thinking about it. We'd rather it be deaf and easy to hush than have it watching you to guess. ### If you change your mind Apple handles refunds for everything bought on the App Store, directly and quickly: ask for one at reportaproblem.apple.com. If it gives you any trouble, write to us and we'll help you chase it. It's $5.99; nobody should have to fight over it. ## FAQs https://tryhorologe.com/faq.html ### How do I get it? From the Mac App Store, for $5.99, paid once (https://apps.apple.com/app/id6796512695). Apple takes the payment, the app comes down, and it's on your desktop in about forty seconds — no account to make, no key to keep, no email to confirm. If you'd rather read the whole spec before you pay, it's on one page at https://tryhorologe.com/buy.html. ### Why would I pay for a clock? For the same reason there's a clock on your kitchen wall and a clock in the phone in your pocket. One of them is a readout; the other is an object you chose. Horologe is the second kind. It's drawn carefully, it strikes properly, and it costs $5.99 once. ### macOS already shows me the time. It's in the corner right now. It is, and you haven't looked at it in an hour. It tells you silently, and only when you look — and looking is a decision, so at 2:40 on a deep afternoon you don't make it. Horologe isn't a replacement for the menu bar clock. It does the job the menu bar clock can't do, which is tell you the time when you've forgotten to ask. ### Isn't a chiming clock annoying? It's a sound, so it can be — we'd rather say that than pretend otherwise. Two things keep it from becoming one. The bells decay like real metal instead of stopping dead, so they leave the room rather than interrupt it; and every part of it comes off. Quarters off, hour only. Volume down. Quiet hours. Right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's silent. Our honest advice for the first week: hour strike only, volume low. If you want the quarters after that, you'll know. ### Will it ring in the middle of a call? It might, and Horologe won't know that it did. It can't see your screen, read your calendar or hear your microphone, so it can't tell a meeting from an empty room. That's why silencing it is deliberately the easiest thing in the app: right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's quiet, without opening anything. Quiet hours cover the same stretch of every day without you thinking about it. We'd rather it be deaf and easy to hush than have it watching you to guess. ### Which chime should I start with? Grandfather, hour only. It's one deep strike, counted out, and it's the easiest thing to live with. Westminster is the full ceremony and it's wonderful, but give yourself a week before you switch the quarters on. If a tune is more furniture than you want, take Temple Bowl: one note, and a long time leaving. ### What does it need from my Mac — permissions, an account, the internet? None of the three, and it never will. Not one permission prompt, now or later: no Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording, no microphone, no files, no location. It never posts a notification either — a notification has a sender, a subject and an implied reply, and the hour has none of those. And it makes no network calls at all: no account, no sync, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no license check, no update ping. It is not that we choose not to send anything, it is that there is nothing in the app that could. Which is also the answer to whether it'll keep working: there's no server to switch off, nothing to deprecate, and no company that has to still exist. If we vanished tomorrow, the copy on your Mac would strike four this afternoon. It reads the clock your Mac already keeps, and it'll do that on an air-gapped machine forever. The same thing at policy length, since Apple asks for it in writing: the privacy policy at https://tryhorologe.com/privacy.html. ### Are the bells recorded from real bells? No, and that's deliberate. A recorded bell is a hundred takes, several hundred megabytes, a license agreement, and the same tenth stroke forever. Every Horologe strike is computed the moment it sounds, from a bell's actual partial structure. It means no sample library, no download, no two strikes exactly alike, and an app that weighs about three and a half megabytes instead of a hundred. Play the bells on the front page and judge for yourself; that's what they're there for. ### Is there a trial? No, and there doesn't need to be — the product is a sound, and the sound is on the front page. Choose any face, choose any bell, strike it, and hear on your own speakers exactly what you'd be buying. There's nothing behind the purchase the page can't show you first. ### Can I get a refund? Yes. Apple handles refunds for App Store purchases directly and is quick about it — ask at reportaproblem.apple.com. If it gives you any trouble, write to us and we'll help you chase it. It's $5.99; nobody should have to fight over it. ### Is it a subscription? Will the price change later? No, and no. One payment, no renewal, no tier above this one, no feature held back for a Pro version. There's no server to pay for, so there's no reason to charge you again. ### Is there a discount? No. It's $5.99, once. That is the discount. ### Will you add more bells and faces? Perhaps, slowly. A new bell isn't a recording session, it's a tuning problem — the partial ratios and the decay rates have to be found and argued over until the thing rings true, and most attempts sound like a doorbell. Buy Horologe for the five bells and four faces in front of you. If more arrive they'll be free, and they'll arrive when they're right. ## Privacy policy https://tryhorologe.com/privacy.html Horologe for macOS · com.tryhorologe.app · last updated 18 August 2026 Horologe collects no data about you. None. Not anonymised, not aggregated, not "only for diagnostics". There is no code in the app that could send anything anywhere, because the app has no networking in it at all. ### What we collect Nothing. Horologe does not collect, store, transmit, sell or share any personal information, usage data, diagnostics, identifiers or content of any kind. The App Store privacy label this app carries is Data Not Collected, which is the literal state of the binary rather than a promise about how we intend to behave. ### The internet The app makes no network requests. It ships without the network entitlement, so even if something in it tried, the system would refuse. There is no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no attribution or advertising library, no update ping and no licence check. On an air-gapped Mac it works exactly as it does on a connected one, which is the plainest test of this whole page. ### Accounts There is no account. No sign-in, no email address to hand over, no profile, no subscription, no server holding anything of yours. You buy the app once and it is yours. ### Permissions Horologe asks for no permissions, now or later: no Accessibility, no Input Monitoring, no Screen Recording, no microphone, no camera, no contacts, no calendar, no location, no photo library, no notifications and no Full Disk Access. It runs in Apple's App Sandbox with no file access and no network access. It reads the clock your Mac already keeps, and that is the extent of what it looks at. ### What is stored on your Mac Your settings — which bell, which face, the volume, the quiet hours, the desktop clock's size — are kept in standard macOS preferences under com.tryhorologe.app, on your own machine. Nothing else is written. If you use iCloud to back up or migrate your Mac, those preferences travel with your own backup under Apple's terms; they never come to us, because there is no "us" for them to go to. Delete the app and the preferences go with it. ### Children The app is rated 4+ and is safe for any age. Since it collects nothing from anyone, it collects nothing from children either. ### Payment If you buy Horologe from the Mac App Store, Apple takes the payment and handles refunds. We never see a card number, a billing address or your name. Apple's own privacy policy covers that transaction. ### Changes to this policy If the app ever gains a feature that touches the network, this page will say so plainly and in advance, with a date on it. As long as it says what it says today, nothing leaves your Mac. ### Contact Questions about privacy, or anything else, go to hello@tryhorologe.com. That's a mailbox, read by the person who wrote the app. ## The journal Short pieces about bells, clocks and the hour, at https://tryhorologe.com/blog/ (RSS: https://tryhorologe.com/blog/rss.xml). Newest first. ### How Horologe's bells are computed, not recorded Published 4 September 2026 · https://tryhorologe.com/blog/how-our-bells-are-made None of Horologe's five bells is a recording. Each strike is computed the moment it sounds, from a table of the bell's own partials: the frequencies a real bronze bell rings at, how loud each one starts, and how long each one takes to die. The whole app, four faces and five bells, weighs about three and a half megabytes. A single recorded bell, done properly, weighs more than that. This is the post about how that works. It's a bit longer than the others, and there are two bells partway down that you can strike yourself. #### A bell isn't a note Press a piano key and you get one pitch and its harmonics: two times, three times, four times the fundamental, all lined up. A bell refuses to line up. Strike a tuned English bell and you hear, at the same time, a hum at half the strike note, the prime at the strike note, a tierce a flat minor third above it, a quint, and the nominal an octave up, which is the loudest of the lot. The minor third is why church bells sound sad. It's cast into the shape. Above those five come the ones a campanologist can still name, and above those a dense family nobody names: in our Westminster voice, twenty-five more modes between three and a half and forty-one times the prime. That family is the clang. It's loud for a tenth of a second and then, because those modes radiate badly, it fades slowly and leaves a bright shimmer over the ring for a second and a half. Leave it out and you don't get a bell. You get an organ pedal. So the table for one bell is thirty-three rows. Each row is a ratio, a starting level, and a time to silence. The hum in Westminster takes nine seconds to fall sixty decibels. The nominal takes about two and a half. The highest mode is gone in a fifth of a second. Mix them and you have most of a bell. Most, not all. #### What makes it bronze rather than a synthesiser Adding sines to a table is the easy part, and it's where nearly every synthesised bell stops, which is why nearly every synthesised bell sounds like a doorbell. Five things in ours are there to stop that. - The onset has a speed limit. A clapper is a lump of metal that deforms on contact, so the force ramps up over a millisecond or two. Measured on real bells the strike takes two to five milliseconds to go from a tenth of its peak to nine tenths. Slower is a swell. Faster is worse: nothing made of metal hitting metal rises in a quarter of a millisecond, and a quarter-millisecond edge is the single most machine-like thing a bell can do. - The clapper is two noises. Under the ringing there's a broad low thud, the clapper deforming the rim, that dies in about forty milliseconds, and above it a thin bronze-on-bronze chip that lasts two or three times longer. Leave the chip out and the bell sounds recorded through a blanket. - Every mode dies at its own rate, and the high ones die slowly. The tuned partials lose energy to the air, so the higher they are the faster they go. The clang family doesn't couple to the air well at all. It's damped by friction inside the alloy, which barely cares about frequency, so a real casting's shimmer at three kilohertz lasts seconds, not a third of a second. Let the low-mode rule run all the way up and the bell collapses into a sine drone inside a second. A recording never does that. - Each mode is really two. No casting is perfectly round, so every mode splits into a pair a few cents apart, and the clapper hits one harder than the other. The pair beats, but unevenly, a two to six decibel undulation rather than a full null, and every pair beats at its own rate, between half a hertz and three and a half. One global rate makes the whole bell swell and dip in lockstep, which no bell has ever done. The warble of a real bell is several unrelated rates drifting through each other. - No two blows land the same. Where the clapper meets the rim, how hard, how glancing: each of those moves individual modes by several decibels on every strike. Identical strikes read as a machine gun. In Horologe each blow in a count gets its own draw, so the twelve strokes of midnight are twelve different blows, spaced a few milliseconds off the beat the way a train of levers and cams would space them. After that, the sum runs into a soft-knee limiter that only touches the transient peak, the same trade every microphone preamp that has ever recorded a bell makes. Below the knee the signal path is linear. Put the output through a spectrum analyser and you see exactly the partials the table asked for, and nothing else. #### Strike one These two are the Westminster hour bell, the big one an octave below the quarters, and the Grandfather, which isn't a bell at all but the chime rods of a longcase clock, struck by a felted hammer. They're rendered in your browser from the same tables the app uses, ported to JavaScript, and they're dry: no room around them. The app and the front page put each in one. Turn it up, and press a button twice. The second blow isn't the first one played again. #### Why not just record one Because a recorded bell is a hundred takes, several hundred megabytes, a licence agreement, and the same tenth stroke forever. Loop it and there's a seam. Play it twelve times and it's the same blow twelve times. The other reason is smaller and we like it more: a computed bell can be struck at any pitch. The four notes of the Westminster quarters are one casting, scaled. That's how a real founder would do it too. The honest cost is on our side of the counter. A new bell isn't a recording session, it's a tuning problem: the ratios and the decay rates have to be found and argued over until the thing rings true, and most attempts along the way sound like a doorbell. Five voices ship. Westminster and Whittington are tower bells in the minor-third family, one on E and one on G. Ship's Bell is small brass, high and short. Temple Bowl is a struck standing bowl on G, one note that takes a long time leaving. Grandfather is the rods. If you'd rather hear them in a room, the front page (https://tryhorologe.com/) strikes three. If you'd rather have one on your desk, it's $5.99, paid once (https://tryhorologe.com/buy), on the Mac App Store. And if you'd like to know what to do with the thing once it's there, start with the hour strike only (https://tryhorologe.com/blog/chime-on-the-hour-mac). Read next: How to make your Mac chime on the hour (https://tryhorologe.com/blog/chime-on-the-hour-mac) ### How to make your Mac chime on the hour Published 3 September 2026 · https://tryhorologe.com/blog/chime-on-the-hour-mac Your Mac keeps excellent time and tells you none of it. The clock in the corner is silent until you look, and looking is a decision most of us forget to make. If you want the hour said out loud — a real strike, not a notification — here's what the system offers and what a dedicated clock adds. #### The built-in way: a voice, not a bell macOS has had an option for this for years. Open System Settings → Control Center → Clock options, and set Announce the time to hourly, with a voice and volume of your choosing. At the top of the hour, the Mac speaks: "It's three o'clock." It works, and it's free, and for plenty of people it's enough. What it can't do is ring. There's no bell in macOS — no strike, no decay, no counting. A voice is a message; a bell is a sound the room absorbs. If you've ever heard a tower clock count three and felt the afternoon arrange itself around it, the difference is the whole argument. #### The dedicated way: a clock that strikes Horologe (https://tryhorologe.com/) is a desk clock for the Mac built around that strike. Here's the honest version of setting it up: - Install from the Mac App Store — $5.99, paid once, no subscription. It's about three and a half megabytes. - The clock lands on your desktop, in front of the wallpaper and behind your windows, and never takes focus. Drag it where you want it; pull a corner to size it. - Pick a bell and a face. Our advice for the first week: Grandfather, hour strike only, volume low. Westminster is the full ceremony; give yourself a week before you switch the quarters on. - Quiet hours are on by default — silent from 10pm to 8am — and right-clicking the bell in the menu bar silences everything instantly. #### What you're choosing between The built-in announcement asks nothing and speaks a sentence. Horologe costs $5.99 once and rings a bell — five of them, each computed from a bell's own partial structure the moment it sounds, so no two strikes are exactly alike. No account, no network calls, no permission prompts, now or later. One limitation, said where you can see it: Horologe can ring during a call. It can't see your screen or your calendar, so it can't know the room isn't empty — that's why the menu-bar mute is one click. If a spoken time is all you want, use the free setting; it's genuinely good. If you want the hour told the way hours were told for five hundred years — counted out, in metal — that's what the app is for. Read next: The grandfather clock at your grandmother's house (https://tryhorologe.com/blog/) ### Missing church bells? Take the hour with you Published 1 September 2026 · https://tryhorologe.com/blog/missing-church-bells-abroad You notice it in the second or third week, not the first. The move is fine. The flat is fine, the work is fine, the language is coming. What's wrong is smaller than any of that and harder to name: nothing rings. If you've moved from a town where the church — or the tower, or the town hall — struck the quarter and counted the hour, into a city where the hour passes without a sound, you've lost a piece of infrastructure that never appeared on any list. Gulf cities, much of East Asia, plenty of new towns anywhere: the hour simply changes, and nobody hears it do it. #### What the bells were actually doing It's easy to write the bells off as decoration, or as religion you happened to live near. They were neither. They were the neighbourhood's clock, and they were working for you whether you were listening or not. The quarter told you where you were in the hour without pulling a phone out of a pocket. The counted hour told you the hour itself, to everyone in earshot at once — a broadcast, not a readout. Weddings rang. Funerals tolled. Six o'clock arrived with a sound, and the evening knew it had started. Homesickness is mostly sound before it's food; the market hum, the tram bell, the bells on a Sunday morning. Take those away and the place is fine, but it isn't yours. #### You can't bring the tower. You can bring the hour. This is where we admit what we make. Horologe is a small desk clock for the Mac that strikes the hour — a bell computed the moment it sounds, not a recording played back. Five bells to choose from, including the Westminster quarters, a ship's bell, and one deep grandfather strike. It sits on the desktop behind your windows, it costs $5.99 once, and it knows nothing about you: no account, no network, no permission prompts. It also has quiet hours out of the box — silent from ten in the evening to eight in the morning — which is the bargain a good neighbour has always made with a bell. And it can't tell a meeting from an empty room, so when you need it gone for an hour, you right-click the bell in the menu bar and it's quiet. It won't ring a wedding. It won't be the sound of a place you left. But at three o'clock it will say three o'clock, out loud, to the room — and that, it turns out, was most of what you missed. You can strike all five bells on the front page (https://tryhorologe.com/) before deciding anything. Read next: Why some bells ring every fifteen minutes (https://tryhorologe.com/blog/) ### What is a horologe? Meaning and pronunciation Published 30 August 2026 · https://tryhorologe.com/blog/what-is-a-horologe A horologe is a timepiece: any instrument that tells the hour. A sundial is a horologe. A tower clock is a horologe. The watch on your wrist, if you still wear one, is a horologe. The word doesn't say how the hour is told — only that it is told. It comes from the Greek hōra, hour, and legein, to tell or to say. Put together they make horologion, an hour-teller, which walked into Latin and then into English. The horologe spelling has been in English dictionaries for centuries, and it keeps the silent-ish ending of its French middleman, horloge. You say it like this: HOR-uh-loj, three beats, stress the first, and the last syllable rhymes with "lodge". #### Horologe, horology, horologist Three words from the same root, three different jobs. Horology is the craft and study of timekeeping — the whole field, from pendulum physics to the finishing on a balance spring. A horologist is someone who practises it: a clockmaker, a watchmaker, the person a museum calls when the longcase on the stairs stops. And a horologe is simply the thing itself, the instrument, the clock on the wall of the word. You'll meet all three in old books before you meet them anywhere else. Writers used horologe when they wanted the clock to sound like an instrument rather than furniture — the tower clock in a distance, the dial on a sundial, anything that stood between the hour and the reader's guess of it. #### Why an app took the word Horologe — the app this journal belongs to — is a desk clock for the Mac that strikes the hour. Four faces drawn in code, five bells computed from a bell's own partial structure the moment they sound, quiet hours from ten in the evening to eight in the morning. It costs $5.99 once, on the Mac App Store. The word fits because the oldest part of the job is the part most clocks have dropped. For centuries, telling the hour meant saying it — a bell counted out three strokes for three o'clock, to everyone in earshot, whether or not anyone was watching. A horologe that keeps the time but keeps it to itself is doing half the job. The dial is the record; the bell is the telling. So that's the definition, and the pronunciation, and the reason. If you'd like the hour told to you rather than shown at you, the clock is on the front page (https://tryhorologe.com/) — you can strike all five bells there without buying anything. Read next: Missing church bells? Take the hour with you (https://tryhorologe.com/blog/missing-church-bells-abroad)