u/BazooKaj

I listen to NTS daily and love the physical player they made with Atonemo. Its Teenage Engineering–inspired look gave me an excuse to try skeuomorphic design. Physical device for reference.

I also wanted a native alternative to listening to this radio in a browser which can be a burden. So I built NTS Dial, a discreet player hiding in your macOS menu bar app.

Features:

- NTS Radio 1, Radio 2, and all 16 Infinite Mixtapes playback
- Keyboard media keys and macOS Now Playing support
- Current station streaming displayed in the menu bar
- Remembers your last played station

Process:

The project took four days: one for the design, one for the initial build, and two for debugging, QA, and publishing.

I built it entirely with Codex:

- 5.6 Sol High for planning, features development, debugging and code review
- 5.6 Terra Medium for UI iterations
- 5.6 Luna Medium for small visual adjustments

I first tried recreating the hardware in Figma using its MCP, but the result wasn’t convincing, so I designed it from scratch. I then used Codex to gather the streams, assets, implement the player and dial logic, reproduce the Figma UI component by component with dev mode on, audit the code, and prepare the GitHub release.

Pretty happy with the result for a four-day experiment. Let me know what you think!

GitHub: NTS Dial repo

AI helped me edit and translate this post.

I’m currently visiting London and using Santander Cycles a lot, but planning routes that include bike docks has been a bit of a chore.

Usually, I have to search for a dock after I’ve already reached my destination, which can lead to surprises, like finding out there aren’t any docks nearby.

I’ve also tried adding a dock as a stop once navigation is already running, but that has been too unreliable for me. I noticed Apple Maps often skips docks that are actually closer to the destination.

I know Google Maps has a built-in feature that seamlessly includes bike docks in the route, but I mostly navigate with my Apple Watch, so I’d rather stay in Apple Maps when I can.

So I made a simple Share Sheet shortcut to solve this. It’s been pretty useful for me, so I thought it was worth sharing.

How it works:

1. Search for a destination in Apple Maps

2. Open the share sheet and run the shortcut

3. It searches for nearby “Santander Cycles” docks within a set radius around the destination

4. It lets you pick one from a filtered list, sorted by distance

5. It opens walking directions from the dock to the original destination

6. From there, you can tap the bike dock to check availability and immediately route there

Link: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3944a890a1ef454c8ae3c2e79da03d1d

It might be useful for anyone who prefers Apple Maps / Apple Watch navigation but still wants something closer to Google Maps’ bike dock planning.

You can adapt it for your own city by changing the search term to your local bike share system, for example Vélib, Citi Bike, Bicing, etc., and adjusting the radius to whatever makes sense.

I’ve set the search radius to 1.5 km / about 0.9 miles because Santander docks aren’t everywhere, but I don’t mind walking a bit.

Feedback is welcomed !

P.S. I’ve used ai (GPT 5.5) to improve the grammar as English is not my first language.