Perch

Perch started with a small, daily annoyance. As an early Notion Ambassador, I was using Notion for my project planning, reminders, and a knowledge base both personally and at work. But as it usually happens, simplicity prevails, and as an Apple user, I’ve really benefited from the built-in solutions, such as Notes, Calendar, and even Apple Reminders. They are simple, quick, and most importantly, they do one thing really well.

However, I noticed a friction. Specifically, capturing a reminder on my Mac meant switching apps, clicking around, and losing whatever I was in the middle of. But since Apple Reminders had become my powerhouse, more than any other reminders app I’d tried, I quickly came to realise that I needed my reminders to be more accessible.

I did look for something that already did this. A few of the menu bar apps out there are nice and had features I’d have happily paid for. But every one of them had features that were built for clicking or just didn’t do what I needed. So I started building my own. I call it Perch.

Perch lives in the menu bar, perching above everything else, always available.

Cmd-Tab, wait for the window, find the list, click the plus, type, click away, Cmd-Tab back. Seven steps to write down four words.

Type it the way you’d say it

You press a hotkey, a small panel drops down, and you type the way you think: “call mum tomorrow morning”. Dates, priorities, lists and repeats are parsed as you type, and plain Return creates the reminder. Semicolons let you fire off several at once. It reads and writes your actual Apple Reminders, so nothing is locked into yet another todo system.

The parser only speaks English and Slovak, which is a deliberate limit rather than a roadmap item. Those are the two languages I can test properly, and a parser that half understands you is worse than no parser at all. The interface itself is localised into twelve.

Small decisions took up more time than I expected. Lists were originally prefixed with #, which looked obvious until I remembered that Apple Reminders uses # for tags, and that EventKit doesn’t expose tags at all. So a user would type what looked like a tag, get a list, and quietly learn to distrust the app. It’s / now.

Everything works without a mouse

The part I care about most is that everything works without a mouse. There are solid menu bar reminders apps for Mac already, but they are built for clicking. Full keyboard operation was the gap I kept running into as a user, so it became the whole point: switching lists, completing, rescheduling, editing, all from the keyboard. ⌃⌥1 through ⌃⌥4 open the panel straight to a given scope, and you can rebind them if those clash with something you already use.

Shipping it, then fixing it

I wrote it in Swift and SwiftUI in a sprint at the end of July 2026, and shipped it under my studio, so & so.

I also shipped it requiring macOS 26, which was a mistake. I’d built against the newest APIs because they were the nicest to work with, and told myself the audience for a menu bar reminders app would be early updaters. They were not. Version 1.2 dropped the requirement to macOS 14 Sonoma, which meant unpicking a handful of those conveniences by hand, and it should have been the requirement from day one.

I wrote about what launching it felt like separately. If it sounds like your kind of tool, have a look at madebysoandso.com/perch or buy it on the Mac App Store.