Holiday countdown
Why I built it
I'm looking forward to my holiday in December, and I'm impatient. So I built a countdown widget for my phone that blends in with the widgets I already have.
How I built it
I'd never built a widget before. I asked AI how, and it pointed me to Scriptable, a free iPhone app that runs small scripts as widgets. AI wrote the code, and we went back and forth on the look: a glass card with the photo on the left and the text on the right, SF Mono in semibold, and the same dark background as my other widgets.
It shows the days left, a live timer and the day and time my flight leaves for Guangzhou.
The hard part
iOS doesn't let a widget be see-through, so something always has to sit behind the blurred photo. The hardest part was getting it onto my home screen, because Scriptable didn't show up in the widget list at first.
Try it
A simplified version of the widget. The timer counts down to midnight and restarts every day.
A different photo every day
Each day of the countdown shows a different photo of Guangzhou, which I picked by hand. It also changes on the big days, like flight day, Christmas and coming home. I use it every day.
