Cadence — a menu bar timer for macOS

What it does

Stopwatch

Click the icon and it counts up. Click again to pause. Finish saves the time to your history and resets.

Countdown

Set a duration and choose what happens at zero — blink in the menu bar, an alert window, a notification, or a spoken announcement.

Pomodoro

Work and break lengths over a set number of rounds, cycling automatically. A rule under the time means you're working; a rule above it means you're on a break.

History

Every session is listed with a marker showing which timer produced it, a running total, and a CSV export.

Installing

Download the file, open it, and drag Cadence into your Applications folder.

Open it. A stopwatch appears in your menu bar — there's no window and no dock icon, which is the whole idea.

macOS will almost certainly refuse to open it the first time. That's expected — read the next section.

macOS will say this app is damaged. It isn't.

Apple charges developers $99 a year for a certificate that tells macOS an app is trustworthy. This is a free app given away for nothing, and there's no certificate behind it — so macOS treats it as suspicious and shows a scary, inaccurate message.

There is no way around this without paying Apple. Not a setting, not a different download link. Either you tell your Mac to open it anyway, or you build the app yourself from the source code.

You should be sceptical of any download that asks you to bypass a security warning. So don't take our word for it — the complete source code is public, every line of it, and you or anyone you trust can read exactly what it does before running it.

Opening it anyway

Paste this into Terminal once, then open the app normally:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Cadence.app"

That clears the "downloaded from the internet" flag macOS attaches to the file. You only need to do it once.

If you'd rather not touch Terminal: open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway next to the message about Cadence.

Or build it yourself

If you'd rather not bypass anything, compile it from source. An app you built on your own machine carries no warning at all.

git clone https://github.com/Paul10142/cadence.git
cd cadence
./Tools/bundle.sh

Using it

Action	How
Start / pause the stopwatch	Click the menu bar icon
Open the menu	Right-click the icon
Start a countdown	Right-click → Start General Timer
Start a pomodoro	Right-click → Start Pomodoro Timer
See your history	Right-click → Show All Sessions
Change how it behaves	Right-click → Preferences

Preferences lets you set system-wide keyboard shortcuts that work from any app, and choose what a plain click does — open the menu, or run any of the three timers.