Appspiration

Have you ever had an idea for a simple app, something to scratch a personal itch, but the thought of setting up a project, writing boilerplate code, and wrestling with APIs made you push it to the "someday" pile? I've been there. But recently, I decided to see if I could bring one of these ideas to life with the help of an AI large language model as my pair programmer. The result? A fully functional macOS status bar application for tracking my daily context switches, built from scratch in a single day. ## The Spark of an Idea My request was simple: a macOS app that lives in the status bar. I wanted a counter that I could manually increment every time I got distracted and switched away from focused work. The counter should reset daily, and I wanted to see a history of my context switches in a bar chart to visualize my focus patterns. The AI immediately laid out a clear plan: a Swift and SwiftUI application, data stored locally in a JSON file, and a status bar icon that wou...

PROBLEM STATEMENT While working on my Laptop, I realized that I often get distracted and switch to non-work related apps or browser tabs, which causes a context switch. I wanted to keep track of how many times and how often this happens. I know there are sophisticated apps that can track this at a granular level, even noting which app is used and for how long, but that wasn't my intention. I simply wanted to track how many times I switch context, so I decided to build an App for my Laptop using Gemini. I started by creating a new folder and launching the Gemini CLI . Compared to my earlier post , this time I was able to save all the actual prompts, thanks to a simple project that saves conversations locally . THE APP (~10 MINUTES) > create a simple mac app for personal use which I can use to track how many times in a day I switch context away from my focussed work. It should be something which runs in the status bar or system tray and I can click on it whenever I feel I have ...

T he most inspiring thing I read this morning: Shaq has been fixing/refurbishing basketball courts for 30 years because he knows they help kids a lot. Economic Times 30-Jul-2025 The story showed how playing on one of those courts probably gave Daniels, who grew up in the city, a big chance. He got good enough to play in the NBA. Later, something cool happened: he and Shaq became teammates on the Boston Celtics! Now, Shaq and Daniels are working together to fix up another court where Daniels lives. It's amazing to see how playing on a court as a kid can change your life, lead to surprising friendships, and make you want to help other kids too.

I wanted to create a simple "Goal tracking" app for personal use. An app which will allow me to add goals and mark them manually whenever I achieve them. So I fired up Gemini CLI . I don't remember the actual prompts nor does Gemini CLI save the history, but the initial prompt was something like this. Prompt:   "You are an expert Flutter developer. Create a simple "stock goal tracking" app to allow users to add manual goals. It should allow users to mark the goal as achieved." Within a few seconds, it not only created the app but also added some built-in goals! But it used "shared preferences" ( a different storage usually for minor things). So I had to prompt it to use the sqlite database (personal preference).                                                                 It also added a "Title" as well as "Description"....

Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast episode Think Bigger & Innovate from ' The Psychology Podcast ' featuring "some" Columbia business professor. Half way through the episode I learn that the guest professor is a blind person! She is Dr Sheena Iyengar! According to Wikipedia, " As a child, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By the age of nine, she could no longer read . By the age of sixteen, she was completely blind, although able to perceive light.  She remains blind as an adult. In 1992, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She then earned her Ph.D . in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1997 " If she can do it, why can't we? #Inspiration #Resilence #NeverGiveUp #WhatsYourExcuse

I was recently listening to a podcast which featured Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels . "Sometimes you have gifts that you don't know about untill you start doing them" Did you know: He studied radiology and worked at hospitals He was an Academic and had been a research scientist at the Cornell University In 2004, Amazon (the book company!) invited him to give a talk about some material he was working on and Werner seemed skeptical about visiting a "book" company After joining Amazon, in 6 months he became the CTO because the existing "Tech guy" at the company really wanted to be a developer! #DiverseBackground