Comments on: Date on Menu Bar in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:40:24 +0000

Hi Cindy, glad you got it working how you want.

I’d just add one point: the day of the week is “automatically” added if you have “Show the day of the week” checked under Date & Time/Clock in System Preferences.

By: Cindy

Cindy — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 10:26:52 +0000

oops…. forgot to add this to my previous post… the fields for the date and time are dynamic — or changing — while the spaces or commas or whatever other symbols you add are static. This is my DATE format:

Jan 5

and… this is what my TIME entry looks like:

7:08 AM / Jan 5

I had to add the colon to the time, the spaces and the slash. BUT, the DAY of the WEEK is automatically attached to the front of the entry, so I guess you don’t need to include it in your formats.

Hope this isn’t too confusing! ;-)

By: Cindy

Cindy — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 10:12:12 +0000

Thanks for all the info here! After about an hour of messing around with the International settings I think I figured out how to set the flippin’ time & date the way I want it! I have a (mid-2009) MacBook Pro OS X (10.5.8)… and here’s what I figured out…

I chose ‘Open International’ in the Date & Time Preferences. Then I clicked the ‘Formats’ tab. I then highlighted and deleted the ‘presets’ for each of the Short, Medium, Long & Full options under Customize for BOTH the DATE and the TIME. This resulted in my Menu Bar displaying ONLY the DAY of the week… instead of nothing (?) so, that is probably why the day of the week repeats in some of the format choices because it’s a default… anyway….

After I had deleted ALL of the SETTINGS… then I entered what I wanted to ‘show’ as the DATE in all four options for the date formats. I copied this into all four of the TIME formats — after I entered the time the way I wanted it. Soooooo….. basically, if ya mess around some, and throw in some spaces, slashes, commas, etc… you should be able to set up the Time/Date preference to behave exactly the way you want it to! It just takes a bit of trial and error.

But, now I have it the way I like it — as follows…

Sun 5:06 AM / Nov 7

Sweeet….. and SO FAR it’s working! Good luck all!

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:10:39 +0000

@Mike, thanks. Glad you found it.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 01:33:56 +0000

Thanks. Did not see this anywhere else.
Very helpful.

By: Ron

Ron — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:20:34 +0000

Thanks, from a Windows Convert, for the tip

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:16:20 +0000

Thanks Nigel. It’s been bugging me for ages. It’s a shame that apple can’t have this as a default option with everything else they’ve got, it’s quite a basic need :)

Thanks Again.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 11:35:35 +0000

It’s a mystery to me Jeremiah. Looking at your post at the top of this thread, we have the same machines, except that I’m running 10.5.8, which I doubt makes any difference. IMHO, there are possibly other permutations of the set up which would explain the difference? However, one thing I note is that in my email headers in Mail, I now see the date repeated! eg. ‘Mon7 Dec 7 Dec 4:27 PM’. I guess this has something to do with me fiddling about with the menu bar setup to get that looking how I want it with the day, day number, month and time all on display?

By: Jeremiah

Jeremiah — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:00:36 +0000

I’m curious what the difference is between our setups if mine uses Medium and Long works for you guys. If we can figure it out, i’ll update the post.

By: Nigel

Nigel — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:21:12 +0000

“The only thing is that it won’t include the AM/PM on the menu bar. Whatever- I’m just happy to have the date!”
Now, there’s a funny thing. I hadn’t noticed the AM/PM annotation had gone missing until yesterday! So I fixed it like this…
Set Long Date to show:- Day, Day number, Month.
Set Long Time to show:- Day number, Month, Hour, Minute, AM/PM
Set Medium Time to show:- Day number, Month, Hour, Minute, AM/PM

That should get you what you are looking for, Adrianne.