Tag: ai

Soon Enough: the day you’re waiting for, up in your menu bar

A small Mac app for counting down to the good things. Free for a week, no account, no card.

I kept doing the same arithmetic in my head. How many weeks until the quarter ends? How many days until the trip? How long until the thing I had been looking forward to since March?

The calendar can tell you, but you have to go ask it, and by the time you find the date and count backward, you have lost the small pleasure of knowing. I wanted the number to just be there, the way the clock is there.

So I built Soon Enough. It puts the next big day in your menu bar, and the rest of them in widgets on your desktop.

The next one, always visible

Click the menu bar, and you get the list: what’s next, what’s after that, and how long each is. It counts in days until the last day, then hours, then minutes.

Nothing to open, nothing to search.

Widgets you’ll actually keep

This is the part people seem to like most. A countdown can be a plain number, a ring that empties as the day approaches, or a split-flap departure board that used to clatter in train stations.

And you can put a photo behind it. The beach you’re going to, the person whose birthday it is, the mountain you’re flying out to ski. It turns a number into something you’re glad to glance at — which, for an app about things you’re looking forward to, is most of the point.

Fourteen colors, and about six and a half thousand symbols to pick from, so a countdown can look like the thing it’s counting to.

For students and teachers

If your school uses Canvas, paste your calendar feed link into Settings › Canvas and every due date starts counting down on its own, by course. No re-typing, no keeping two lists in step. Assignments appear as they’re posted and disappear as they pass.

I teach, I use this, and it is the feature I would not give up.

The small things

It talks to Siri and Shortcuts, shows up in Spotlight, and syncs through your own iCloud account if you want it on more than one Mac. It can remind you on the day. Every destructive thing can be undone. It works properly with VoiceOver.

It updates itself.

Your countdowns live on your Mac. No ads, no analytics, no tracking, and no account to make — I never see your data because it never comes to me.

What it won’t do

It is not a task manager, and I have deliberately kept it from becoming one.

No projects, no subtasks, no priorities, no completion percentages. A countdown is a date, a name, and how long is left. If you want to track work, you already have something better than this.

It needs macOS 15 Sequoia or later. That one stings a bit — it rules out some older Macs — but Sequoia is what makes the widgets behave the way I wanted.

It is Mac only. There’s no iPhone app (yet), and I’m not promising one.

Try it for a week

Soon Enough is free for seven days, with every feature unlocked. No account.

No credit card. Download it, and it just runs.

After the week, a license is $9.99, once — not a subscription — and it covers up to three of your Macs. And if you don’t buy one, the app doesn’t hold your countdowns hostage: the menu bar and your widgets keep working. You just need a license to add or change a countdown.

If it turns out it’s not for you, email me within 30 days, and I’ll refund it.

Download the free trial at soonenough.app

If you try it, I’d genuinely like to know what you’re counting down to.

Canvas knows which students are struggling. It just doesn’t tell you.

On a Monday morning, you open Canvas and see a grid filled with dozens of students across the top, a dozen or more assignments down the side, and several hundred cells overall. Most of these cells are perfectly fine, but among them are the students who have quietly stopped submitting their assignments.

The data isn’t hidden. Canvas has all of it. But a gradebook answers what did everyone get?, and the question I actually have on a Monday is who do I need to write to? Those are different questions. Getting from one to the other means scrolling, sorting, and keeping a running tally in your head per course, every week, for as many sections as you teach.

So I built EarlyARC. It’s a free, native Mac app that reads your Canvas courses and gives you the list: who needs attention, worst first, with a reason on every line.

Every flag says why

The rule I set at the start: EarlyARC never shows you a number without a reason. Not a risk score, not a colored dot, not “82% confidence.”

Each flagged student gets plain English: “3 of 15 assignments missing — 23% of the grade,” “current score 61%, below 70%,” and ” how long since they were last active in the course. You can see, in one line, whether this is someone who’s drifting or someone who had one bad week.

That’s partly so you can act on it. It’s also because you may end up explaining the flag to the student, and “the algorithm said so” is not an explanation either of you deserves.That’s partly so you can act on it. It’s also because you may end up explaining the flag to the student, and “the algorithm said so” is not an explanation either of you deserves.

Read-only, and it keeps almost nothing

EarlyARC only reads from Canvas. It cannot change a grade, post an announcement, or alter your course. There’s no path in the code that writes to Canvas at all.

Rosters live in memory while the app is running and are gone when you quit. No cache, no database, no file of student work sitting on your laptop. Your access token goes in the macOS Keychain, protected like a saved password.

This is student data. The safest place to put it is nowhere.

The part that was genuinely hard

The way out was to store the app’s opinion instead of the student’s work. EarlyARC keeps a course ID, a Canvas student ID, a date, the risk level it assigned, and how many pieces of work were missing. No name, no grade, no score, no assignment titles, no message text.

I want to be precise about what that is and isn’t, because “no name” is not the same as “anonymous.” A Canvas student ID is an identifier — under FERPA’s definition, it is personally identifiable information, just as a name would be. Anyone at your institution who can already see your course could resolve one to a student.

What the design buys is smaller and more honest than anonymity: the file holds the least that will answer the question, nothing in it is a grade or a piece of student work, and it never leaves your Mac. It’s a much thinner record than the gradebook export most of us have sitting in a Downloads folder right now. One entry per student per day, forgotten after a year, switched off or deleted from Settings in one click.

Storing grades would have been easier and would have bought nothing except a file I’d have to defend.

What it won’t do

It won’t tell you why a student stopped. That part is still your job, and it always should be. EarlyARC doesn’t predict, doesn’t reduce anyone to a percentage, and doesn’t contact anyone on your behalf. When you’re ready to reach out, it fills in your own message template and hands it to you to send.

It surfaces. You decide.

Try it out! It’s free


EarlyARC is free, runs on macOS 14 or later, and has a sample-data mode so you can see exactly how it works before you connect it to anything real.

I built it alone, with Claude Code. One instructor, no dev team, no budget.

GET earlyarc