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 ...