Today - a screensaver for Mac OS X

by Matt Sephton

Screenshot

Background

Inspired by On Kawara's "Today Series". A series of paintings, each consisting of a monochrome background onto which is inscribed the date of the day on which the individual painting is executed, in the language and according to the calendrical conventions of the country in which Kawara is present when he began it. Kawara created nearly 3,000 date paintings in more than 112 cities worldwide in a project that was planned to end only with his death. He died at age 81 on July 10, 2014.

Download

10.13+ (High Sierra+) Universal ARM/Intel build for Apple silicon zip file (74kb) 13 December 2023
10.13+ (High Sierra/Mojave) zip file (61kb) 14 March 2019
10.7 to 10.13 (Lion through to High Sierra) zip file (63kb) 19 September 2012
10.6/7 (Snow Leopard/Lion) zip file (55kb) 18 August 2009
10.5 (Leopard) zip file (61kb) 23 April 2009
10.4 (Tiger) is not supported

Installation

1. Double click Today.saver to install using System Preferences
2. Select Today in the list of screen savers
3. The binary is not signed, so you'll need to approve it manually:
   1. Show in Finder, right click and choose open
   2. Select Today in the list of screen savers (again)
   3. Show in Finder, right click and choose open (again)
4. In recent versions of macOS you may need to install the TTF font manually
5. (here's a screenshot of it running on my Apple silicon Mac)

Configuration

The screensaver can be configured to display: Date, Time or Day. Background colour can also be chosen, or selected at random.

Source code

Full source code is on GitHub, it really needs modernising to remove legacy and deprecated APIs.
Please contact me before undertaking any major work. Approved Pull Requests will be happily merged.

Playdate

A version of Today for Playdate is available at my itch.io page.

Version history

13 December: new build to support Apple silicon, no new features but please refer to installation (1.25)
2023
09 March: Playdate version released
2022
14 March: new build to support macOS Mojave, no new features (1.23)
2019
19 September: now supports short time format, where seconds are not displayed (1.21)
28 August: now supports screensaver icons and 12/24h date formats (1.20)
2012
20 July: Confirmed working on Mac OS 10.7 Lion
2011
18 August: Added support for Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard (1.12)
23 April: Fixed a bug related to the random background colour option (1.11)
21 April: Added background colours with random option (1.10)
09 April: Initial release (1.00)
2009

Links

MoMA on the Today Series
Tautologies by On Kawara
On Kawara article at Wikipedia
Google Image search for On Kawara's "Today Series"