Skip to content

How to display the date in OSX Leopard Menu Bar

Posted in mac, osx, tips. Tagged with date time, leopard, mac, osx, tips.
November 9, 2008 9 comments

If you don’t want to fumble around just to learn the current date, you can display it in Leopard’s Menu Bar, right by the clock, to always have under your eyes.

What I did was to follow TUAW’s tutorial, but here’s a quick summary, just in case you’re in a hurry:
1. in System Preferences, International, Formats submenu. Select Customize date, then chose the format you want, and COPY it (select all, Cmd+C).
copy_date_format
2. Press Ok, then from the same window, Customize for the Times part. Move the cursor before the time format, press Cmd+V(Paste). Press OK.

leoparddatemenu

Easy peasy.

Welcome back on Hack the Day! Have you subscribed to my RSS feed? We have some great productivity tips, hacks and daily inspiration!

Related posts:

  1. 7 geek tricks for a fresh OSX Tiger install
  2. Forget the Apple Terminal, now you have Quicksilver
  3. Get rid of the MobileMe sync icon in Leopard’s menu bar
  4. Essential tips to make your Mac the king of USER FRIENDLINESS
  5. Secure your Mac – Password protected screen lock

9 Responses

Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Harrison said
    on December 13, 2008

    Great trick! Make sure you have the show option set to ‘Medium’ and not ‘Short’.

  2. Josh said
    on December 16, 2008

    I had to set the show option to ‘Long’ for it to work for me.

  3. pilotrtc said
    on December 18, 2008

    btw: it affects how the date/time is displayed in iCal. Also, these fields should be labeled as required if they are.

  4. Walter said
    on June 18, 2009

    Thanks. Like Josh I found it works only in Long on OSX 10.5.7

  5. Vincyman said
    on February 2, 2010

    With some fiddling I finally got my iMac to display Tue Feb 2, 2010 2:55 AM showing “Short” in both Dates and Times. I have no idea why it worked. I have an iMac G5 non-intel using Leopard 10.5.8.

  6. chefjeegar said
    on September 3, 2010

    Thanks a lot, though my time displayed right next to the year look funny. I guess I can live that as I am the only one using this machine.

    This comment box doesn’t allow me to put the pic, but to give u an idea it goes like this:

    Thu 2 Sep 201022:10

    So there is no space between last digit of the year and first digit of the time.

    But trick worth the effort though.

    Cheers!

  7. bill b said
    on February 23, 2011

    thank you, thank you thank you. I spent hours trying to get this using the leopard help.

Continuing the Discussion

  1. Essential tips to make your Mac the king of USER FRIENDLINESS | Hack the Day linked to this post on December 11, 2008

    [...] Customize the time display in the menu bar [...]

  2. Diogo Santos » Exibindo a data na barra de menu do OSX Leopard linked to this post on March 4, 2009

    [...] semana passada, eu usei uma dica do Hack the Day para exibir a data na barra de menu do Leopard, para ficar como no [...]