A booking calendar that lives in my menu bar
My rental agency could only send me screenshots of my own apartment's booking calendar. So I designed and built my own: a minimal Mac menu bar app that shows every booking at a glance. Directed end-to-end with Claude Code — from problem to shipped app in a single session.
Tools
Claude Code
Date
2026
The problem
I own an apartment in Empuriabrava that a rental agency manages for me. The setup works, except for one thing: I never had a simple way to see when it was booked. Every time I wanted to check availability, I had to email the agency and wait for them to send back a screenshot of the calendar. Their software couldn't export or share the calendar directly, so I was stuck asking — and waiting — every single time.
The idea
Instead of chasing the data, I decided to build the tool I was missing: a tiny Mac app that lives in the menu bar and shows me my apartment's bookings at a glance. One click, and I see what's coming up — no emails, no waiting.
The process
This was an experiment in designing and shipping a real product end-to-end using AI as my execution partner. The AI handled a lot of the building.
I worked through it in layers. First, getting the availability data into a clean, standard calendar format that updates on its own. Then designing the interface — a dark, minimal popover, because the whole point was a calm glance, not another dashboard to manage. I used a reference I liked as a visual starting point and shaped the layout, hierarchy and states from there: today's status at the top, upcoming stays as clean rows, a quiet footer.
For the build I used Claude Code, adjusting the layout, fixing issues, wiring the data to the UI, and packaging it into a proper Mac app.
What I took from it
The tools have changed what a designer can ship alone. I didn't hand off a spec and wait — I designed the thing and had it running the same day. AI didn't replace the design decisions; it removed the distance between deciding and doing.