menuDrop #

tl;dr I made a little Mac app to access your Raindrop bookmarks easily from your Mac’s menu bar. Below is a bit of background on how I made it and why. If you want to skip all that and download it, head over to the app page and do so!

Longer Version #

I’ve recently started using Raindrop.io to store my bookmarks. The full background is probably worth its own post, but suffice to say a big part of it was because it’s a web service backed by a robust API that lets me interact with it in different ways.

Raindrop.io has an iOS and Mac app which are both perfectly… cromulent. They serve my needs okay for the most part, and there is a Raycast extension that lets me search my Raindrop bookmarks quickly. But what was missing – and what I’d searched for and never really found – was a way to access my frequently used bookmarks from my Mac’s menu bar. I just wanted to “favourite” a bookmark and have a list of my favourites readily accessible for links I want on hand quickly.

I’ve never made a Mac app before, but I do of course have Claude Code! Not only that, but I have a headless Mac mini that I can access from my phone through SSH in a terminal emulator using Tailscale.

What all that means is that I could log into my Mac’s terminal from my phone while on the subway and tell Claude to make the app I wanted. I only had coverage at stops, so between stops I’d send Claude some commands to get it working, then check in again at the next stop. When I got home I logged into my Mac and had an app!

It was a little rough around the edges, but I iterated on it to get it where I wanted and ended up with a useful little app for accessing my bookmarks. It has a truly awful icon that I hastily made and will one day update.

I’m putting it up on my micro apps site for anyone else who finds it useful. If that’s you – great!