A macOS Menu Bar Calendar That Does Exactly That
Calery lives in your menu bar — calendar, reminders, and Pomodoro timer in one panel. No subscription, no network access, $2.99 one-time.
I opened Apple Calendar to check a meeting time. The app launched, filled the screen, I found the time, closed it, and went back to what I was doing. Two context switches for a three-second task.
That felt wrong. Not catastrophically wrong — just quietly, repeatedly wrong. The kind of friction you stop noticing until you do.
A menu bar calendar would fix it. Click the icon, glance at the time, click away. One context switch, or zero if you count a glance as free.
So I went looking.
The options were there, and they each solved part of the problem.
Itsycal is free and open source. It puts a small calendar grid in your menu bar, syncs with your existing macOS calendars, and stays out of the way. For pure calendar viewing, it works. But you can’t create reminders from it. There’s no timer. It’s a read-only window into your schedule — useful, but not a workspace.
Fantastical is the other obvious choice. Natural language input, weather integration, meeting suggestions, team scheduling. It’s a genuinely well-made app. It’s also a subscription — roughly $57/year for Premium, $40 for Plus — and most of what you’re paying for is features you’ll never touch. If you need collaborative scheduling across a team, that price makes sense. For one person who wants to see their week and start a focus timer, it’s a lot of surface area for a menu bar utility.
BusyCal is a capable full-featured calendar with a one-time license around $50, but it’s primarily a Dock app, not a menu bar app. You’re still opening a full window.
Apple Calendar is free and solid, but it has no menu bar UI. Dock only.
The gap was specific: a menu bar app that shows your calendar, lets you create reminders without leaving the panel, and runs a Pomodoro timer. Small, fast, no subscription. That combination didn’t exist, so I built it. That’s Calery.
One design principle shaped everything: don’t break focus.
A menu bar app has a natural contract with the user. It appears when called, disappears when dismissed, and never competes for screen real estate. Calery takes that contract seriously. There’s no Dock icon. No separate window. The panel drops down when you click the menu bar icon, and everything — calendar, reminders, timer — lives inside that panel. Close it, and it’s gone. The rest of your screen stays exactly as you left it.
The menu bar itself carries information too. Next to the date, you see how long until your next event. If a timer is running, the remaining time shows there as well. You’re in another app, heads down on something, and the menu bar is sitting quietly at the top of your screen. You don’t need to switch — you glance. That’s the whole idea.
The calendar view shows a monthly grid alongside a daily timeline. Under the hood it’s EventKit, which means it reads whatever calendar accounts you already have set up on your Mac — iCloud, Google, Exchange, whatever. No separate account configuration. The calendars you have are the calendars Calery uses.
Keyboard navigation works throughout. Arrow keys move through dates without touching the mouse. When you’re checking a week of meetings, that matters.
One detail that earns its place: meeting link detection. If an event contains a Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, or WebEx link, Calery surfaces it as a button directly in the event view. You don’t hunt through the description field forty seconds before the call starts. The link is just there.
Multi-day events render with two-lane bars in the month grid — the visual logic is clear even when you have overlapping spans.
Reminders work from the same panel. Type the text, pick a date, done. The reminders sync with macOS Reminders via EventKit, so the system handles notifications. Overdue items are flagged separately so they don’t blend into the current day’s list. You can toggle reminder visibility in settings if you want to keep the view clean.
The timer is where the three tools start to feel like one.
There are two modes: Pomodoro and countdown. Pomodoro lets you configure work and break durations, tracks session counts, and runs the cycle automatically. Countdown gives you presets from one to thirty minutes, or a custom duration you type in. Short breaks, meeting buffers, “I need to stop in twenty minutes” — that’s the use case.
What makes this worth having inside a calendar app rather than a standalone timer is the combination. You’re in a focus session. The menu bar shows “18 min remaining.” You glance and also see that your 3 PM call starts in 35 minutes. That’s not information you had to go find. It’s just there, ambient, because the timer and the calendar are looking at the same piece of screen.
Running a separate Pomodoro app alongside a separate calendar app means two sources of time awareness, both demanding attention at different moments. Merging them into one menu bar panel means one glance covers both.
Settings are in ⌘, and they stay practical. First day of week, menu bar date format, per-calendar visibility, upcoming event range, reminder show/hide toggle. You configure once and don’t revisit it. The app is localized into ten languages — Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Hindi — so the settings work in whatever language you’re running macOS in.
Privacy is structural, not a policy. Calery has no network access. There are no analytics, no crash reporting that phones home, no account to sign into. Calendar and reminder data stays on the device because EventKit never leaves it. Calendars often contain meeting subjects, attendee names, and occasionally sensitive context. With Calery, that data doesn’t move. There’s nothing to audit, no terms of service to read carefully, no data retention to wonder about.
That’s not a feature added on top of the app. It’s a consequence of how the app is built.
Calery requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later and runs on Apple Silicon. The menu bar panel is the entire UI — there’s no full-window mode to fall back to, because the goal is always to stay out of the way.
The price is a 7-day free trial, then $2.99 as a one-time purchase. No subscription. The app doesn’t become less useful over time, and there’s no annual renewal to decide whether it’s still worth it.
A typical day with Calery ends up looking something like this. Morning: glance at the menu bar to see when your first meeting is. Mid-morning: start a Pomodoro for the writing block you’ve been putting off. A notification for a reminder pops up — you check it from the same panel without opening a second app. Ten minutes before the 11 AM call, the menu bar updates, you see it peripherally, wrap the paragraph you’re on, join via the meeting link button. Afternoon: set a 15-minute countdown for a quick review pass on a pull request, then another Pomodoro after the break. The panel opens maybe a dozen times. Each interaction is a second or two. The app never asks for more than that.
Compared to juggling Calendar in the Dock, a separate Pomodoro window, and macOS Reminders in yet another app, the difference isn’t a leap in features — it’s the removal of small interruptions that used to stack up across a day.
If you’ve been using Apple Calendar from the Dock and it’s been a low-level annoyance — an extra context switch you’ve stopped noticing — Calery closes that gap without introducing new ones. Calendar view, reminder creation, and a Pomodoro timer, all in the menu bar, all in one click.
Download on the App Store → Calery
App overview and screenshots → apps.somee4.com/apps/calery