The best clock screensavers for Mac: flip clock, binary clock, station clock and desk alarm

If one clock defines the genre, it's the flip clock. The split-flap display was born in railway stations and airports, then moved onto bedside tables in the 1960s and 70s, and it has never really gone out of style. On a big Mac display it is pure pleasure: the top half of each card tips forward around its hinge every minute, with a shadow that sweeps across the card below.

SCRNSVRS's Flip Clock is built for reading across the room. Choose 12- or 24-hour time, show or hide the seconds, and pick a Night, Graphite, Paper or Amber theme to suit your desk. It is the screensaver to install if you only install one.

Platform clocks are designed for exactly one job: to be read at a glance, from far away, by someone in a hurry. That makes them perfect screensavers. Station Clock follows the German DIN tradition – bold bar indices instead of numerals, broad black hands, a minute hand that jumps once a minute, and a thin red second hand that ticks with a tiny overshoot.

It is the calmest clock in the collection. Pick a white, black or cream face, a dark, concrete or night-blue background, and – like every clock here – zoom it and move it anywhere on screen, so it can sit in a corner of a large display.

Some of the best industrial design of the last century went into small desk alarm clocks: a square body, a clean dial, a single accent colour for the alarm hand. Travel Alarm is our tribute to that idea, drawn from scratch for a Retina screen.

It works best as a quiet presence. Run it as your live wallpaper and the time is always there behind your windows; set it as the screensaver and it greets you when you come back to your desk. Zoom and position controls let you make it as small or as bold as you like.

The binary clock is the geek's wristwatch: a grid of LEDs that shows the time to anyone who can count to eight in base two. The classic layout uses one column per digit with bit values 8, 4, 2 and 1 – so 18:05 is "1 and 8, 0 and 5", read from the lit dots in each column.

Our Binary Clock adds the little things that make it lovely to watch. The LEDs fade on and off like real ones behind a diffuser, and you can choose red, green, blue, amber or white. Switch on the bit values and digit readout while you learn, or switch them off for pure light – and for the hard-core, there is a plain-binary layout with one row each for hours, minutes and seconds.