Building Menubar Apps with AI

Some people collect baseball cards, others obsess over video games. I love menubar apps. No clue why, I just really like the convenience they offer, because they provide such an easy way to view and interact with information of all types.

I've always wanted to build one, but never wanted to invest the time learning Swift, Objective-C, or ElectronJS. The emergence of AI coding tools, and particularly agents, has completely changed the game in terms of writing software, and so I've lately been wondering how feasible it is to not only create my first menubar app but actually create some sort of software factory that can churn out dozens if not hundreds of menubar-first applications.

The first app is called TerraTime. It's a menubar app that shows the current time in a variety of timezones. TerraTime was built with Cursor in about 20 minutes. I spent another 75 minutes or so figuring out how to sign and notarize the app according to Apple requirements. The app is currently for sale on Gumroad, and will soon be available on the Mac App Store.

To catalog what I hope will quickly become a collection of useful menubar apps, I've created a new site called Useful Menubar Apps. It was also built with AI, and is hosted on Netlify.