Do you ever look at the GNOME Calendar and Clock icons and think: “they’d be much cooler if they showed the current date and the actual time”?
If so, a brand new GNOME extension lets them do precisely that!
It’s called ‘Dynamic Calendar and Clocks Icons’ (sic) and adds dynamic, updating app icons for GNOME Calendar and the GNOME Clocks apps. The Calendar app icons updates to show the current day, month, and date, while the Clocks icons shows the current time on simple analog face.
Update: this extension now supports a dynamic weather icon for the GNOME Weather app too!
This extension works with all icon sets, including Ubuntu’s Yaru icons. Though the ‘dynamic’ icons are NOT the same as the icons they replace, they don’t look that out of place in either Yaru or the Adwaita icon packs.
However, against more stylised icon packs I do imagine they’ll look a touch conspicuous.
Of course, having dynamic icons tucked away in the application picker isn’t the point, here. You should add them to the Ubuntu Dock so they can be seen!
And here’s a really cute touch: the clock icon shows a moving seconds hand, as you can (just about) see if you stare at this GIF for a few seconds:
In all, this is a simple, straight-forward extension that adds subtle flare to Ubuntu desktop. Is it revolutionary? No, but it is cute, and more convenient than using a script to do the same thing.
You can install Dynamic Icons from GNOME extensions, though I recommend using the Extensions Manager desktop app rather than a web browser. You can also grab the source code on GitHub.
At present this extension only supports GNOME 43 and above, so you can’t use this on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, only subsequent releases.