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
(Man ... what a nerd I am ...)
tags: ComputersAndTechnology