Tooling

A fresh Mac collects apps fast. These five are the ones still there a month later. Itsycal is the one I put back first: a small icon in the menu bar, and that is the whole reason it stays. Itsycal Itsycal is a tiny menu bar calendar. The icon is a small block with the day of the month in it. Click it and the month drops down. It reads events from Calendar.app, can show the ISO week number, and can stand in for the system clock if you hand it a date pattern. ...

The status line is the one piece of UI I look at every few seconds, all day. So I stopped treating it as a place for a model name and a branch, and made it answer the questions I actually have while I work. Is the context about to compact? Am I burning through my limit faster than the window allows? When does it reset? What has today cost? And what is the weather doing outside? ...