A tiny, subtle timer for your Mac that stays on top of your slides — even in full-screen mode. Built for workshop facilitators who need to keep time without breaking flow.
You're facilitating a workshop. You've given the group five minutes for a breakout. You need a timer visible on screen — but your presentation is in full screen.
So you alt-tab to a browser timer, losing your slides. Or you hold up your phone awkwardly. Or you just guess and interrupt too early (or too late).
It's surprisingly hard to find a simple, floating timer on Mac. So we built one.
Stays on top of full-screen presentations, Keynote, PowerPoint, Zoom screen shares — everything.
Right-click the pill for presets (1–30 min), pause, reset, or set a custom duration. No fiddly UI.
Start, pause, reset, and toggle visibility without touching the mouse. Fully customisable in preferences.
Change the background colour, text colour, and corner radius. Make it match your brand or go fully transparent.
Native Swift app — no Electron, no browser, no bloat. Less than 200KB. Lives in your menu bar.
Position the timer wherever you want. It remembers where you put it between sessions.
Never installed an app outside the App Store? No worries — it takes about a minute. Here's every step.
Click the Download for Mac link above (or the button at the bottom of this page). On the GitHub page, click the file ending in .dmg — it's a small file (under 1 MB) and will download in seconds.
Find FloatTimer-X.X.X.dmg in your Downloads folder (or click it in your browser's downloads bar). Double-click to open it. A new window will pop up showing the FloatTimer app and an Applications folder shortcut.
In that window, drag the FloatTimer icon onto the Applications folder. This copies the app to your Mac, just like any other app. You can then close the window and eject the disk image.
Go to your Applications folder (in Finder, click Go → Applications from the menu bar, or press ⇧⌘A). Find FloatTimer and double-click it. A small timer icon ⏱ will appear in your menu bar at the top of the screen — that's it, you're running!
When you first open FloatTimer, macOS will show a warning saying it can't verify the app. This is completely normal for free, open-source apps — Apple charges $99/year for developers to register, and we've chosen to keep FloatTimer free instead.
Here's how to tell your Mac it's okay to open:
That's it — you only need to do this once. After this, FloatTimer will open normally every time, just like any other app. The source code is fully available on GitHub if you'd like to verify what the app does.
FloatTimer will also ask for Accessibility permission the first time you use keyboard shortcuts. This is needed so the app can detect your key presses even when other apps are in the foreground. macOS will prompt you automatically — just click Open System Settings and toggle FloatTimer on. (This is the same permission apps like Alfred, Rectangle, and BetterTouchTool use.)
Workshop Timer is a clean, full-screen countdown timer that runs in any browser. No install needed — just open the link on any device. Same simplicity, zero setup.
Try Workshop Timer →FloatTimer is free, open-source, and built by a facilitator for facilitators.
☕ Buy me a coffee