# Slate: a to-do list that lives on your wallpaper

> A macOS menu-bar todo app that renders your list straight onto the desktop, shipped solo to the Mac App Store with a paid unlock, a headless render harness, and a first-run bug that only existed for real installs.

Canonical URL: https://saifsiddiqui.in/ar/work/slate/ (this is its markdown representation; the same URL serves HTML to browsers)
Other languages: en: https://saifsiddiqui.in/work/slate/ · hi: https://saifsiddiqui.in/hi/work/slate/ · kn: https://saifsiddiqui.in/kn/work/slate/ · ur: https://saifsiddiqui.in/ur/work/slate/ · te: https://saifsiddiqui.in/te/work/slate/ · hi-Latn: https://saifsiddiqui.in/hi-latn/work/slate/

**الدور:** بني من الصفر  
**المكدس:** Swift, SwiftUI, macOS, EventKit, StoreKit

**الروابط**

- Mac: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6796836834
- Web: https://slate.ziyarex.com/

## Problem

Every todo app has the same quiet failure: you have to go and look at it. The
list lives behind a window, a window has to be opened, and so the list is only
ever as present as your willingness to check it. The one surface a Mac shows you
whether you asked or not is the wallpaper. Close a window, quit an app, come
back from lunch, and it is already there.

So Slate is not a todo app with a wallpaper export bolted on. The wallpaper is
the primary display: a SwiftUI view goes through ImageRenderer to a PNG, then
NSWorkspace.setDesktopImageURL puts it behind everything, once per display. The
app window and the menu-bar popover exist only to edit the thing you are already
looking at.

## Decisions

**Rendering to a picture is not rendering to a screen.** ImageRenderer will not
rasterize a ScrollView, and a SwiftUI Form is one, so the entire settings window
is invisible to the renderer by construction. That is not a bug to work around,
it is a boundary that decides how the app can be tested: anything inside a Form
can only be verified by opening the real window and capturing it. Knowing that
early is why the test harness looks the way it does instead of being a pile of
screenshot diffs that quietly never covered Settings.

**Own the store, mirror Reminders, and refuse to approximate.** Slate keeps its
own JSON store and mirrors Apple Reminders as a second read source. Mirrored
reminders are never written into that store; they are merged at read time from
the last fetch. No local copy means no drift, no tombstones, and no conflict
resolution to get wrong, and a reminder deleted on an iPhone simply stops
appearing. Slate writes back exactly two properties, completion and due date.
EventKit exposes neither subtasks nor complex repeats, so those are dropped
rather than approximated. Every second Tuesday, rendered as roughly weekly,
would have demoed beautifully and been worse than absent: a schedule you cannot
trust is one you have to check somewhere else, which is the whole problem the
app exists to solve.

**A harness, because no eye scales to seven by nine by twenty-one.** Seven
wallpaper templates, nine placements, twenty-one palettes, fourteen typefaces
and twelve background patterns compose into more states than anyone can look at.
So the app ships its own dev CLI and I built it before I needed it. One flag
runs 1034 in-process assertions against a throwaway store, never the real one.
One stress-renders every template against dark, light, overflow and empty. One
writes a wallpaper per pattern and per typeface. One composes the seven App
Store product frames at 2560 by 1600, so the store page is a build artifact
rather than an afternoon in a screenshot tool. One draws the purchase screen
with stand-in plans, because StoreKit returns nothing headless and would
otherwise render a priceless, disabled button that misrepresents the normal
state. One prints every entitlement StoreKit will admit to and which environment
answered, for the day the app insists it is unlocked and you need to know why.
That harness is the reason one person can change a renderer on a Tuesday and
still ship on Wednesday.

**The bug that only exists for other people.** The very first
setDesktopImageURL into a freshly created sandbox container silently no-ops. On
my machine, where the container had existed for weeks, this was invisible. For
anyone installing from the App Store it would have been the entire first
impression: I opened Slate and nothing happened. The fix is a coordinator that
re-checks 2.5 seconds after applying and re-applies once, verified against a
wiped container. The habit I kept is more useful than the fix: every ship now
gets one deliberate pass in a state I cannot reach by developing normally.

**Two rejections, both facts I could not have guessed.** First, the sandbox
entitlement com.apple.security.personal-information.reminders does not exist on
macOS. The Mac sandbox has addressbook, calendars, location and photos-library,
and EventKit reminders live under calendars, which I confirmed by running
sandboxed against 22 real reminders across both lists. Second, the Mac App Store
requires LSApplicationCategoryType in Info.plist and mentions it only after you
upload. Both were fixed the same day, and both are now checked by a preflight
script that runs before every archive, because the second time you learn a fact
like that is a day you paid for twice.

**Free to open, paid to keep, and the submission order matters.** Slate installs
free and a one-time purchase unlocks the rest. Apple reviews an app's first
in-app purchase only alongside an app version, in the same submission, and
submitting the version on its own is a single click that strands the purchase in
a draft reading "unable to submit for review". So the release checklist ends with
opening the submission and confirming it lists both items before anything is
sent. Pricing and paywall copy are product decisions; the submission order is
just a trap, and traps belong in a script.

## Outcome

Slate is [live on the Mac App Store](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6796836834),
released 4 August 2026 and at version 1.3 within a fortnight, with a
[landing page](https://slate.ziyarex.com/), a privacy page, and a support page I
also wrote. Everything in it is mine: the idea, the renderer, the design system,
the seven templates, the palettes, the store listing, the in-app purchase, the
hardened runtime, the notarization, and the updates since.

The part I would keep from this build is the harness. A solo app has no reviewer
and no QA, so the only thing standing between a change and a broken wallpaper on
someone's desktop is whether verification is cheap enough that I actually run
it. Making it a single command was not thoroughness. It was the only way to keep
shipping at all.

جميع الأعمال: [/ar/work/](/ar/work/)

---

Mohd Saif, Product Engineer. I build solutions, not dead software.
Email: saifmd238@gmail.com · GitHub: https://github.com/Saif-09 · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohd-saif-134076141/ · Résumé (PDF): https://saifsiddiqui.in/resume

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