Being the wacky programming nerd I am, I've a thing for clock programs. One of my first Delphi apps was a stay-on-top, get-out-of-the-way-when-you-mouse-over-it clock program. I like having a good clock I can quickly glance up to and take a look. I also always have my TaskBar Auto-Hide, so I never have its clock handy to see. I've not much free time these days, and rolling my own hasn't appealed to me, so I've been on the lookout more and more.
For a while this past year I used ElprimeClock. It's free, good features, and has a transparency option and/or an auto-hide-on-mouse-over option. Works pretty well, except over time its idiosyncrasies got to me. The stay-on-top more or more would lose the King of the Mountain competition too often with other stay-on-tops (and not stay-on-tops). The transparent option was fine, until the thing under it was the Firefox loading animation, causing the clock to flicker.
A few months ago, I thought, surely someone's thought of chunking the time into the titlebar of your active window. And someone has, with TitleBarClock. Modern versions aren't free, but I did find an old version lurking on the ‘net that was free. It works pretty well, but not a lot of options, and it takes about a second for it to update the current title bar whenever the window changes, and for some reason I find myself looking for the time a lot right after a window change.
So I'm at home and start looking for the free version of TitleBarClock to get it up and running here, and I just now ran across TicTocTitle. It's free, very small, and is zippier than TitleBarClock. Very uncomplicated, configuration in a simple .ini file, with enough tweakability to satiate the obsessive spirit. I'm gonna give it a go here and see how if it plays nice with everyone on the desktop.
My settings:
[Settings] titlestring=h:mm tt - Ddd Mmm d copystring=yyy.MM.d H:mm:ss font=MS sans serif size=9 boldness=700 ;1-1000 400=normal 700=bold color=FFFFFF xoffset=-75 yoffset=4
