I got a sidebar app built1 to act as a shortcut lookup for Herdr. I started with the following requirements:

  1. Native MasOS app for speed and minimal resource consumption.
  2. Contents read from a markdown file
  3. Can either float as a normal app or stay on top based on a toggle

The hotkey sidebar app, showing a floating panel of shortcuts

I was inspired by this Hacker News article which argues against the rise of TUI apps, encouraging engineers to instead embrace the ability to build native GUI apps instead. While I do like some of the TUI apps I’ve been using so far, the article did spark something in my mind I had long forgotten.

I was around 2005 when I bought my first ever MacBook Pro. I really wanted to use it to its full potential, and hence dabble a little with Xcode to see if I could build my own native apps.

Back then the language used was Objective-C, and I tried my best to learn it to write basic apps. It was fun for a short while, but I unfortunately got nowhere. It wasn’t for the lack of time (I was still young), but more so the lack of resources available when I got stuck in a coding problem.

Fast forward to today and this is no longer a barrier with agentic programming. I don’t need to know Swift (which replaced Objective-C a while back) and got cracking to get this app built in under 30 mins.

I’m super happy with it, and even added a few extra bells and whistles to it, such as commenting out lines so that they don’t show on the app. This is for hotkeys that I want to hide for now rather than removing them from the markdown file altogether.

Footnotes

  1. I’m deliberately trying to avoid saying “I built” when it comes to agentic programming. I didn’t write most of the software, and hence I’m using the causative form of “I got x built”. ↩