Ever since I moved to Santiago, Chile in July, I've asked myself "What time is it in San Francisco?" multiple times a day. Sometimes it's for something practical (knowing whether or not I should be on a conference call) and sometimes it's for something stupid (figuring out whether or not it would be a good time to tweet because the majority of my followers won't even see it). Either way, I need to know.
I tried to find an application that runs in the OS X Menubar and displays the time for a different time zone and I did find a few programs that sort of did that:
Unfortunately, they didn't do just that. I couldn't figure out how to prevent World Clock Deluxe from opening up a floating clock in addition to the menubar and iStat Menus wanted me to click the clock every time I wanted to see the alternate time.
Today I decided to just write it myself. Armed with a vague recollection of iOS development experience and the power of Google, I took the shell of a menubar demo and extracted some code from Menubar Countdown and tweaked it until it worked. Then I slapped an icon from Glypish onto it and called it a day.
Hipster looks like this in your menubar:
You can download it here.
Unzip the file and drag Hipster into your Applications folder. Run it.
If you want it to run on startup, go to:
System Preferences -> Users and Groups -> Login Items
and hit the [+] and select Hipster from your Applications.
You may notice that there is no Preferences option. In fact, the only option is Quit Hipster. I realize the ridiculousness in a menubar application that only displays the time for San Francisco and my only defense is that this is my first Cocoa Mac Application and I have no idea how to create a Preferences pane.
Source code is available on github - if you are able to create a basic Preferences pane that lets you specify a time zone, I will happily accept a pull request.
You can change the time zone by opening up StatusBarAppAppDelegate.m and looking at line 41. Change America/Los_Angeles to whatever you need it to be and hit Build in Xcode.