I'm a procrastinator. If something needs to be done by 2:00 PM, I'll often finish it at 1:59. My procrastinating tendencies sometimes make me late though. Like many people I've tried the old "set your clock ahead 15 minutes" trick, but it doesn't work -- I just find myself mentally calculating every time I look at one of my clocks.

This week Component X released an interesting little Mac utility for people that like me have a procrastination problem, inspired by Guy Kawasaki's Alltop. It's a menu bar clock replacement called Alltock that runs anywhere from right on time to fifteen minutes fast, but the trick is that you never know whether it's running fast or not. This forces you to assume that the time is accurate, and ends up more often than not making you a little bit early.

While I love the concept, the execution leaves a bit to be desired. While it's easy enough to hide your Mac's built-in menu bar clock, you can't move the Alltock clock over to the right on the menu bar. This is apparently due to the fact that Alltock was created as an application rather than as a system preferences pane, which was apparently necessary because the system's internal clock is not actually being changed. However, I find it hard to believe that it couldn't have been done as a system preferences pane -- on my system I've replaced the system clock with one from iStatMenu, which is a preference pane.

My other gripe with Alltock is the fact that there is no ability to hide the dock icon. If a user really wanted to replace their system clock, I see no reason to leave the new clock's dock icon sitting there taking up valuable screen real estate.

Complaints aside, the concept of Alltock is a winner, and hopefully a subsequent version will make it a truly viable system clock replacement.