One of the things that you probably look at a lot more often than you realize is the time display in the top menu bar. If you came from a Windows environment, you may have tweaked out that display to show you the date and/or the day of the week. Apple seems to think it’s sufficient to let you see the time, and if you can figure out how, the (abbreviated) day of the week. We just happen to like having a bit more information available at a glance:
Above you see our top menubar time display, along with the dropdown menu you get if you right-click on that display. As you see, we show the day of the week (non-abbreviated), the full date (again non-abbreviated), the time complete with seconds, and an AM/PM indication (by the way, it’s only highlighted blue like that because we have the dropdown activated - usually it’s the normal black text on the semi-transparent background). As you may have guessed, we have a wide screen display - were it a regular display we might try to conserve a bit more space, but as it is we have enough screen real estate that we can afford to have the display the way we want it. But, you may be wondering how we did it - if so, that’s the purpose of this article.
To begin with, click on “Open Date & Time” in the dropdown shown above. That will open this preference panel (you might have to click on the “Clock” tab at the top):
In this panel, check the options shown above and any others you want EXCEPT for “Show the day of the week” - if you check that, you’ll get an ABBREVIATED day (e.g. Mon Tue Wed etc.). We are too OCD around here to want to stare at an abbreviation, we like seeing the word spelled out! While you’re in this panel, click on the “Date & Time” tab and the display will change to this - make sure you have selected a server and that you have checked the box to set date & time automatically.
We would just point out that if you have another machine acting as a timeserver on your local network, or you prefer to use a non-Apple timeserver, you are perfectly free to enter the address into the text field (this example shows using another machine on your local net as a time reference):
Anyway, see the button at the bottom of that panel labeled “Open International”? You need to click on that now, which will bring up the International preference pane. Select the “Formats” tab and you will see this display:
First note that the Region is set to “Custom” - we don’t remember doing that, and think that it probably changes automatically once you start customizing formats, but just keep in mind that it probably does need to be set to “Custom” for this to work. Now, note the two “Customize” buttons in the Dates and Times sections. We’ll show you the Times section first, so click on the LOWER “Customize” button, so we can show you how we constructed our date and time string. On the panel that appears, be sure to select “Medium” in the “Show” dropdown, because this is the format the menubar display uses (and just about nothing else uses it, as far as we can see):
Unfortunately our string is a bit longer than the display allows, so in order to let you see it all, here’s the same display but with the cursor moved all the way to the right:
When you first enter this panel, it will show you the current time format, except that if you checked the box to show the (abbreviated) day of the week, that will not appear here. What you want to do is insert the elements you want to use to build your date and time string, as we have done. You can drag any of the elements in the bubbles from the list shown, and you can insert normal punctuation such as commas, colons and spaces. But as you may have noticed, we have “bubble” elements that don’t appear in the panel! Where did we get those? Well, if you back out of this panel to the previous one (”international” panel, “Formats” tab), then click on the FIRST “Customize” button (in the Dates section), and then select “Full” from the dropdown, you should see this panel:
Now, here’s the trick. TEMPORARILY drag the date elements you will need into the text field - you don’t have to remove the ones that are already there, just drop these after the existing string. Then use the mouse, or the shift+arrow keys, to highlight just the elements that you temporarily dragged into the field. Press Command-X to “cut” (copy and delete) those elements, leaving only the original format string (if you make a mistake at any point in this process, pressing Command-Z should undo the last thing you did). Now back out of this panel and click the “Customize” button for the Times section again - once again make sure this dropdown shows “Medium”, then use Command-V to paste the copied date elements into the time string! If they aren’t in the correct order you can highlight each individual item and drag it around until you get it right. Insert any desired punctuation (commas and spaces) and you should be good to go.
It is a little tricky to position the cursor properly during this process (between the “bubbles”), so don’t get too frustrated, just realize that it’s tricky for everyone and you should get it in a few tries, and remember to use Command-Z if you make a mistake.
We do realize that someone will probably want to point out that the latest version of iCal displays the current date on its icon in the dock, but we like to see our date and time information in one place at a glance, not have to search the dock for the iCal icon!
Uber-geek tip: The actual menubar time string format definition is stored in the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.MenuBarClock.plist, and if you knew the correct format you should (theoretically) be able to change it in that file only, with changing the “Medium” time format for other applications. But unless you are a true geek (or like to live on the edge) we don’t recommend attempting to manually edit that file, because you could really mess up your menubar clock. If you simply must try to do it that way, at least please back up the file someplace safe before you start messing with it, so you can restore it if your edits really mess things up!
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