Got the Time?

Being in a leadership position for the last 7+ years of my career meant that engineering took a back seat to other more important parts of the role, leaving the smarter people to do the actual engineering and building.

I am however, and have always have been, an engineer first, and while I was fortunate enough in my previous role to still have a somewhat direct role in engineering, whether through code review, taking on some smaller tickets, or when limited by resource, to handle some of the bigger tickets , I didn't get to do as much of it as I wanted.

However, I still have to keep current, learn new technologies, revisit old ones, and keep myself challenged: Writing code will always be fun for me, and is my main source of learning languages/systems.

Don't get me wrong, some days it can be incredibly trying (and frustrating), especially when you're doing small bits of code that don't really challenge the mind, or you're learning something new and don't fully understand how it works (Monkey C) but I do love the challenge of doing something outside of my comfort zone, and now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I have started tackling some of the languages I didn't have time for/need to work with again on other projects (SwiftUI, PHP, non-React based JS/SCSS, Solidity, and lately Monkey C for Garmin Devices) and it has been incredibly fun, and reminded me why I started doing this in the first place over 21 years ago: 😲

Over a year ago, working with teams across the globe, I wanted to be able to quickly see the time in different timezones (to make sure I was mindful of our engineers time, and not sending them messages at some ungodly hour) with a little distraction or context-switching as possible. It shouldn't break your concentration to simply check the time, right?

I don't like/use widgets on macOS much, mostly because they're hidden away, but also because preferences 🤷🏼‍♂️, but what I do spend a lot of time (and have a penchant for) using are menu bar apps. They're there when you need them, non-obtrusive when you don't, and generally get the job done.

With that in mind, I set about revisiting SwiftUI and built a very rough menu bar app to show the time in different timezone. It took a few hours one night, and it worked well for my needs, but the timezones were hard-coded, and I'd have to build the app every time I needed to add a new one.

Recently, I decided to take it from a simple hard-coded utility app, and make it useable for anyone on a Mac, and the result is "Got the Time?" - a super simple menu bar app for macOS - it can be used as a secondary clock showing a different timezone, or as a drop-in replacement for the existing clock in the menubar (with some effort on your part).

I use it every day: A simple click on the clock, and I can change to any of the timezones I have configured, et voila, the time in your required timezone.

If this is something that piques your interest, you can find it available for purchase below.