Apple added a Clock app to macOS Ventura, and with it came a timer tab. On paper, that closes a gap that existed for years. In practice, the feature is limited in ways that become obvious as soon as you use it for anything beyond a single, occasional countdown.
It's a start, but calling it a complete timer solution overstates what it actually does.
What the Clock app timer can't do
It supports exactly one active timer at a time — start a second and the first is replaced. There's no way to see the countdown without opening the app or checking a small window, and it disappears from view the moment you switch to another app or go full screen. Setting a duration means scrolling hour, minute, and second wheels individually, which is slower than typing a number would be, let alone dragging one. There's also no haptic or tactile alert on completion — just a sound and a notification, easy to miss if your Mac is muted.
For a single "remind me in 10 minutes" use case, it's fine. For anything involving multiple tasks, frequent use, or environments where you can't hear a chime, it runs out of road fast.
The fix: Tickpull
Tickpull addresses each of those gaps directly. It lives in the menu bar so it's always visible, supports multiple parallel timers instead of just one, starts with a drag instead of a scroll-wheel, and delivers haptic feedback on Force Touch trackpads when a timer completes.
Always-visible countdown
A live ring fills around the menu bar icon, visible from any app, at any window size, without opening anything.
More than one timer
Need a cooking timer and a work timer running together? Tickpull handles both as independent rings instead of overwriting one with the other.
Faster to start
One drag from the menu bar icon replaces three wheel-scrolls and a tap on Start. The whole interaction takes under a second.
The Clock app timer is a reasonable fallback when you have nothing else installed. Once you need more than a single occasional countdown, it's worth swapping for a tool actually built for the job.