I’ve been messing around with Claude Code to build myself some tools for writing and uploading to this blog, and I was doing that, and getting a bit bored, so I thought I’d make something that I want rather than something that I need.
I love theme parks, as you can tell if you’ve looked around this blog even a little. I’d recently come back from a trip to Disneyland Paris, and part of my daydreaming, and wishing to be back on holiday involves checking the current wait times even though I’m hundreds of miles away at home.
I could use the official app, but I wanted something I could check at a glance, as I’m working or doing other things, just to cheer myself up.
UI Inspiration
I started work on this little project one very hot weekend, so, naturally, being a moderate obsessive, I was looking at the weather app to check the temperature, which made me start thinking, it’s a simple list with icons showing you the weather, and importantly, it pops out from the macOS menu bar. Just what I’d want a wait times app to look like.
Specs
So using that as a guide, I started with Claude Code, I know the fundamentals of Swift UI, the goal wasn’t to learn this time, I just wanted to make something using the Theme Park Wiki API.
My criteria were:
- Simple Scope, wait times, and the ability to favourite certain rides.
- A hero section like the weather app, which shows the lowest wait time out of your favourite rides across all parks by default.
- The ability to choose one of your other favourites for the hero section if you want.
- Auto updating respecting the API rate limits.
First Attempt
This is what I got more or less with one shot:
Features
It displays the wait times of rides you select from either Walt Disney World Parks or from Disneyland Paris. You choose your favourites and then they appear in the list of wait times. Once a ride is in the list, the lowest wait time across all favourites is displayed as a large header card. If you want to choose a different ride to be the ‘Hero’ you can click on that ride in the list. And that’s it!
Some rides, primarily from Walt Disney World have a little more information in the API and we can display an ‘expected wait time’ graph in the hero section. This is sometimes fun to see what the actual time is vs the predicted one.
You can see an example of this in the next image:
Things Left To do
There’s more I want to do, the UI needs some work, the spacing is off in various places, I’d like the UI to be a bit more fun, I need to design an actual icon, and I want to also add a widget for the desktop.
I really enjoyed just doing something with no real reason. I just did what I wanted. It was fun. I’m not planning on releasing it but as a fun little project for myself I think it’s pretty cool.