A minimalist analog clock / watch face screensaver for macOS: 16 dial themes, luminescent night mode, live weather, and a matching web demo. Free and open source; a no-cost alternative to paid clock screensavers like Bauhaus Clock or Fliqlo.
- Landing page
- Live demo - the entire screen saver running in a browser tab.
- 16 dial themes — from classic white and noir to pastel pistachio, lavender, salmon and ocean.
- 3 movement styles — smooth
Quartzsweep, tickingMechanical, and a cleanDigitalsecond hand. - Night mode with lume — 14 glow colors (amber, tritium-green, ice-cyan, …) for hour markers and hands when it gets dark.
- Day / Night / Auto — auto mode computes local sunrise/sunset from your city (NOAA solar equations, no network calls).
- Optional date complication — tiny date window that matches the theme.
- Adjustable glow intensity in the settings panel.
- Custom background: bring your own wallpaper. Pick any image, or pull your current desktop background, with an adjustable dim that keeps the dial in focus.
- Native macOS screen saver (
.saverbundle) plus a pixel-identical web version sharing the same geometry.
- Download the latest
Chronoface.pkgfrom Releases and run it. - On macOS 14 Sonoma and later the installer puts Chronoface.app in
/Applications(with the screen saver extension) and opens it automatically so you can set theme, movement, night mode and city right away. - Enable it in System Settings → Screen Saver → Chronoface.
- To change settings later, open Chronoface.app again (there is no "Options…" button in System Settings: the modern screen saver extension format has no API for one, so configuration lives in the app, the same approach Aerial 4 uses).
On macOS 13 Ventura the same installer drops a legacy Chronoface.saver into
/Library/Screen Savers/ instead, and there you do get a Screen Saver Options…
button in System Settings.
Prefer no app? Download Chronoface.saver.zip from Releases, unzip and
double-click Chronoface.saver. This installs only the legacy bundle (best on
macOS 13; on Sonoma the app + extension build behaves better).
Requires Xcode 15+ on macOS 13+.
open Chronoface/Chronoface.xcodeprojBuild the Chronoface target (⌘B). Xcode drops Chronoface.saver into the build
directory — double-click it to install.
The entire clock is reimplemented in vanilla JS/Canvas so the landing page and
live demo are visually identical to the native screen saver. Source lives in
web/html/:
index.html— full interactive demo with the settings panel.landing.html— marketing landing page (same clock, simpler chrome).chronoface.js— rendering logic mirroringChronofaceView.swift.style.css— shared styles.
Any visual change to the screen saver should be mirrored in chronoface.js
and vice versa.
Chronoface/
Chronoface/ChronofaceView.swift # entire screen saver (themes, rendering, settings UI)
Chronoface/thumbnail.png # preview shown in System Settings
Chronoface.xcodeproj/ # Xcode project
web/html/ # web demo + landing (mirrors the Swift rendering)
generate_thumbnail.swift # regenerates thumbnail.png from the native drawing code
Jenkinsfile # CI/CD for the web version (chronoface.perek.rest)
swift generate_thumbnail.swiftThis re-renders Chronoface/Chronoface/thumbnail.png from the same drawing
primitives the screen saver uses, so the System Settings preview always
matches the current default theme.
swift generate_marketing_assets.swiftProduces two files from the same drawing code as the screen saver:
web/html/og-image.jpg- 1200x630 social card (Noir dial + amber lume), referenced byog:image/twitter:cardon the landing page.web/html/themes-grid.jpg- 4x4 grid of all 16 dial themes. Used both as the README hero above and as the visual for the "Colour Palette" section of the landing page.
MIT © Serhii Perekrestov