WhatDay
v1.2.0 Windows Free and open source
What bloody day is it?
Everything tells you the time and date; nothing tells you the day. WhatDay does. It puts the name of the day in a small dark strip above your taskbar, changes it at midnight and does absolutely nothing else.
Today, for the record. Drag it about; it will not go on the taskbar either.
Born of frustration
The clock knows the year. It will not tell you it is Thursday.
You work from home. Or you have just had a week off. Or it has simply been one of those weeks, where Tuesday and Friday are the same grey shape. You glance at the corner of the screen and Windows helpfully tells you the hour, the minute and the date down to the year.
You then count on your fingers from the last thing you are sure happened on a Monday.
That is the whole problem. A computer that can render a film, translate Portuguese and lose an argument with a printer could not be persuaded to show one word. So now it does.
Engineered far beyond reason
It shows one word from a list of seven. Here is what that took.
A reasonable person would have written this in an afternoon. What happened instead is below. Every number on this page was measured from the code, because making them up would have been the one shortcut out of character.
Days checked: every date from 2000 to 2399, each against a second, independent weekday formula written into the tests.
In case the programming language got Tuesdays wrong.Time zones walked midnight by midnight for an entire century, to prove every day begins exactly when it should.
You live in one of them.Midnights that never happen, where clocks jump straight past 00:00. WhatDay finds when those days really start, by bisection, to the nanosecond.
A nanosecond is quite precise for a word.Test coverage of every line that decides what day it is. The build refuses to run if it slips.
There is no switch to skip it. That was deliberate.Structural tests that fail the build if the architecture of this one-word program is compromised.
Four layers. Clean architecture. For "Saturday".Lines of formal requirements specification, every requirement tied to the test that proves it. Every change of mind is a numbered amendment.
One of them is about the Quit button.Colour-science standards (WCAG contrast and CIEDE2000) consulted so seven colours are legible and look nothing alike.
Amber and Yellow are closest. They were checked.Roughly as many lines of tests as lines of program.
Over a hundred tests, for seven possible outputs.Routes through its own bespoke installer: install, update, go back, repair and uninstall, each with its own screen.
It has a repair screen. For a word.Network connection: an anonymous look at its own releases list, to tell you about a new version. Not "we promise": a test fails the build if any other code so much as imports a network package.
It still does not need the internet to know it is Wednesday.Is it overkill? Yes. Is it ever wrong about the day? Also, demonstrably, no.
The feature list
Short. Deliberately.
What it does
- Shows the day, in English, in full, in a strip as tall as your taskbar.
- Changes at midnight in whatever timezone Windows is set to. Fly to Sydney and the day follows you.
- Catches up after sleep, a clock change or a timezone change.
- Stays where you drag it across restarts. Never on the taskbar.
- Hides for fullscreen films and anything else that takes the whole screen, as the taskbar does.
- Starts when you sign in, if you leave that ticked in setup. Quit it from the tray whenever you like.
- Tells you about a new version once a day, with Download, Skip This Version or Later. Skip it and it stays skipped.
What it does not do
- The date, the time or a week number. Your clock has those. It is very proud of them.
- Light mode. The strip is always dark. So is this page. You were warned.
- Settings windows. The tray menu holds About, Check for updates, Support, seven colours and Quit. That is the lot.
- Telemetry. No accounts, no tracking. Its one connection asks GitHub for its latest release and sends nothing about you. Setup connects to nothing at all.
- Other languages. The days are in English, wherever you are.
- Anything but Windows. Windows only, for good.
Download
Install it once. Never wonder again.
Version 1.2.0Windows
Windows; tested on Windows 11 22H2 and later
Download for WindowsRun it and choose Install. It installs for your account only, so Windows never asks for administrator rights. Then look down: there is the day. Leave Start WhatDay when I sign in to Windows ticked and it will be there every time.
Built and tested on Windows 11, where the strip gets its translucent Acrylic backdrop (22H2 and later). To remove it, uninstall from Settings, then Apps; that takes the program, its settings and its log with it.
What is new in this release · All releases · Source on GitHub
Supporting WhatDay
Free. It stays free.
There is no paid tier, no licence key and no feature held back behind a donation. There are, frankly, not enough features to hold one back. If WhatDay has saved you from counting on your fingers, a contribution supports its maintenance and continued over-engineering. The same link sits in the tray menu as Support WhatDay.
Donate