Yesterday I was browsing Reddit (as a person with my profession would do) and found a simple Gumroad Mac app that made snow stack on top of your dock with a penguin sliding around. The app was only four bucks, and as the senior software engineer that I am, I immediately wanted to build something similar—but with a twist: I wanted my Mac mouse cursor to leave behind snowflakes, and ideally make it customizable so you could swap the particles for anything. The catch? I don’t actually know how to code Mac apps—I mostly write C code for Windows. So I did what any sane person with no Swift knowledge would do: I asked ChatGPT, then jumped into Xcode and built a SwiftUI macOS app with a transparent, borderless overlay window that sits above everything (screen saver level) and ignores mouse events. From there I used a CAEmitterLayer + CAEmitterCell setup to spawn PNG particles (snowflakes) at the cursor position, then tweaked things like birth rate and scale so it didn’t look ridiculously intense. The main takeaway is that some ideas feel “hard” until you actually implement them—and sometimes it’s way more straightforward than you think.