About the project

Day of the Day grew out of a simple idea: when you open your Mac in the morning, you should immediately see what makes today special. Beyond official holidays, the app knows hundreds of "quirky" ones — from International Hug Day to Programmer's Day — and surfaces them in three places at once: the main window, the menu bar, and a widget.

Use cases

Quick glance

The menu bar icon shows today's holiday in a single click. No window switching, no breaking your flow.

Content planning

For social media managers and content creators — a ready-made source of news hooks for every day of the year. Browse what's coming tomorrow, next week, or any date you pick.

Just curious

Find out that October 16th is Boss's Day and March 20th is the International Day of Happiness. A small daily discovery.

Technical decisions

Hybrid SwiftUI + AppKit architecture

The main window is pure SwiftUI, but the status bar item and popover are driven by a classic AppDelegate with NSStatusItem and NSPopover. The popover's content is an NSHostingView wrapping a SwiftUI view — native AppKit container, modern UI framework.

Single source of truth via @AppStorage

All user preferences are centralized in one file as static @AppStorage properties. This solves synchronization across the main window, popover, and widget without any third-party libraries.

Holidays as data

The holidays database is an in-memory Swift structure roughly 380 KB. No Core Data, no network — everything is compiled into the binary. Instant startup, full offline support, perfect for App Sandbox.

StoreKit 2 subscription

Monetization through modern StoreKit 2 with a local configuration file for testing. Transparent paywall, explicit restore-purchases button, real-time subscription state.

Localization

The app is fully translated into 4 languages: English, Russian, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese. Holiday descriptions are culturally adapted, not machine-translated.

System requirements

• macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel
• ~50 MB free disk space
• macOS widget support