Countdowns, weather, golden hour and the moon, glanceable on the Mac desktop. Day Board is a native macOS app and widget set I designed and built in SwiftUI and WidgetKit, and use every day.
The problem
My days revolve around light and dates. As a photographer, I want to know when golden hour starts and where the moon will be. As a remote designer, I look forward to milestones like Summer Fridays and the first evening after daylight saving time begins.
That information was scattered across a weather app, a photo-planning app and calendar math in my head. I wanted one quiet panel on my desktop that answers “how long until” and “what will the light be like tonight.”
What it does
- Countdowns and spans: A countdown can be a single day or a span. Summer Fridays runs from the Friday before Memorial Day to Labor Day. While a span is underway it can show your progress (“Day 12 of 98”) or stay hidden, and when it’s over it counts down to next year’s, so you set it once.
- Presets: Daylight saving time, equinoxes and solstices calculated from the sun’s position, Summer, Winter and common US holidays.
- Calendar import: One connection covers every calendar on the Mac (iCloud, Google, Exchange). Turn a single event into a countdown that follows it if it moves, or auto-add everything from a chosen calendar.
- Icons: Search about 150 SF Symbols, or upload any image, which is converted to a one-color icon that matches the widget.
- Weather: Apple Weather or Open-Meteo, in °F or °C.
- Sun: Sunrise, sunset, day length, golden hour and blue hour, with an arc showing where the sun is right now.
- Moon: An accurate phase drawing, illumination, moonrise and moonset, and the next full and new moon.
- Four widgets: Extra-large Day Board, large Sky, small or medium Countdowns, and a small Moon widget. Each one picks its own countdowns and style from macOS’s Edit Widget menu.
Design decisions
- Monochrome, with one accent: Everything is one ink color plus a muted tone. The only color is amber, saved for golden hour, the moment the widget exists to flag.
- Numbers as the hero: Countdowns and times use a monospaced face so values line up and don’t jitter as they change.
- Liquid Glass first: The default style uses system colors, so macOS 26 Tahoe can render it as glass or tint it with the desktop. On Sonoma and Sequoia it falls back to standard system materials. Dark and Light are there for a fixed look.
- Photographer details: Golden and blue hour sit on the main board, not in a detail view, and the moon is drawn from its real illuminated fraction.
- Designed before built: Every widget size and the edit panel were mocked up on a design canvas in all three styles before any SwiftUI was written.
How it’s built
- SwiftUI + WidgetKit for macOS 14 and later. One set of views draws both the widgets and the in-app preview.
- App Intents power each widget’s Edit Widget settings.
- On-device sky math: a Swift port of SunCalc calculates sun times, golden and blue hour, moon illumination and moonrise/moonset without a network connection.
- WeatherKit or Open-Meteo, cached and shared across widgets, with the attribution each source requires.
- EventKit for calendar import, so iCloud, Google and Exchange calendars work through one permission.
- Shipped sandboxed, signed with Developer ID and notarized by Apple.
Process
Built over about a week with Claude as a design and engineering partner: a written brief, a design canvas of every widget size, a native build, then rounds of my visual review, from the Liquid Glass preview to the calendar and span features that came out of using it daily.
What’s next
- Hourly cloud cover on the sun card, to tell whether golden hour will actually be golden
- An iPhone and iPad version that shares the same countdowns
- Holiday presets beyond the US
- An icon redrawn in Apple’s Icon Composer with layered Liquid Glass