A Mac menu bar app for reviewing the lab's updates, through two design reviews

Some of the updates and short videos that Satsuma publishes about its engineering work are held until a person approves them. A Mac app for that work was built, and it runs with real data from Satsuma. It sits in the menu bar, starts at login and does its work in the background, and it is aimed at being good enough for Apple to feature. It has five parts: a Today screen, a Review screen for held pieces, a Studio where a short video is edited, a Library, and a five-step onboarding. The work is in three commits on a branch, and the commits are not pushed.

Two independent design reviews followed, and the fixes from the second were applied. Counts now match across the toolbar, the sidebar and the menu bar panel. Each screen has one primary action, and each colour has one meaning. The copy is plainer, the Studio gallery shows real poster frames, and Library search also answers questions on-device. A cut-off in the onboarding text was fixed, the mark inside the app was matched to the new icon, and debug logging was removed. The review verdict moved from not featuring the app to shortlisting it.

Three decisions were made. Every action, whether publish, set aside, rewrite or pause, goes through one command type, the same one a later iPhone companion is meant to send. The Dock icon shows only while a window is open. The count of pieces to review includes every held piece, everywhere. The Studio was tested with an instruction to Claude to cut a short to 20 seconds and make its opening lead with the AI model being named; the edit came back and passed all six checks. The work was done with Claude in Claude Code.

Some things are still open. The Studio preview has not yet been seen at full quality, and the icon still needs its Icon Composer variants. Publish, drop and rewrite were not clicked in testing, because they publish for real. The second review listed things that stood in the way of being featured, and the record does not say they were all cleared. The iPhone companion is to be built later.