I’ll be honest about something: Pocket Trip Planner has technically run on Mac for a while now. “Technically” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It launched, the trip list showed up, you could tap around with a mouse pretending it was a finger — and that was about it. No keyboard shortcuts. No right-click. Hit Return in a text field and nothing would happen, because nothing was listening for it. It was an iPhone app that happened to open on a Mac, not a Mac app.
1.7 is the release where I stopped letting that slide.
What I wanted
The pitch for Pocket Trip Planner hasn’t changed: one place for your itinerary, packing lists, budget, important dates, and notes for a trip, without an account, without ads, and without your itinerary getting parsed on someone else’s server. Everything runs on-device, and Pro is a one-time unlock, not a subscription.
What I wanted for 1.7 was for the Mac version to actually feel like it belonged on a Mac. Same SwiftUI codebase as iPhone and iPad — I’m not maintaining a separate Mac app — but built to expect a keyboard, a mouse, and a window you can resize, instead of assuming every tap is a finger and every list only ever gets swiped.
Why I built it
I’ve been a software engineer since 2012, and Pocket Trip Planner is very much a nights-and-weekends project — built in the margins between a day job and a family, one trip’s worth of frustration at a time. I plan our vacations in it, so most of what changes in this app started as something that annoyed me personally on an actual trip. The Mac work was no different: I opened the Mac build to plan a trip, reached for a keyboard shortcut that didn’t exist, and started a list.
Version 1.7
A real menu bar
There’s now an actual menu bar, not just the default Edit/View boilerplate macOS gives you for free. ⌘N starts a new trip, ⌘F jumps straight to Find Trips & Plans, and ⌘, opens Settings — the shortcuts you’d expect from any Mac app. The Help menu points to the in-app guide and About screen instead of sitting empty.
Right-click, everywhere you’d expect it
Every list in the app that had a swipe action on iPhone — budget entries, transactions, transportation legs, packing items, imported events — now has the matching right-click menu on Mac. Rows also reveal their actions on hover, so you’re not left guessing that a menu exists at all. None of this is new functionality, exactly; it’s the functionality that was already there, finally reachable without a touchscreen.
Drag and drop for Trip Files
Trip Files — the per-trip vault for confirmations, boarding passes, and screenshots — now accepts a drag straight from Finder instead of forcing you through a file picker every time. While I was in there I also found and fixed a genuinely annoying bug: a PDF downloaded from Safari would silently fail to import. Turned out macOS tags downloaded files with a quarantine attribute, and the app was choking on it during the copy. Fixed now, and it also opened the door to accepting images alongside PDFs.
The small stuff that adds up
The rest of 1.7 is a pile of things that were each small on their own but, together, were the difference between “runs on Mac” and “works on Mac”:
- Escape and Return now actually do something in every add/edit sheet in the app — trips, packing items, important dates, transportation, events. Previously they were just decorative buttons you had to click.
- The Pro upgrade screen used to render tiny and unscrollable on Mac, cutting off half the feature list. It’s been resized and laid out properly for a wider window.
- Typing a budget amount and hitting Return used to do nothing — you had to reach for the mouse and click Add. It submits now, like it should have from the start.
- Restore Purchases is more reliable. There was a bug where the app could read an empty purchase history right after launch and assume Pro had been revoked, which was especially visible on Mac where a fresh restore is more common.
- The home screen widget actually refreshes when your trip data changes, instead of sitting stale until the OS got around to it on its own schedule.
None of this required a separate Mac codebase or a bunch of #if os(macOS) branches scattered everywhere — almost all of it is the same SwiftUI views iPhone and iPad already use, just given the extra affordances a mouse and keyboard expect. That was the whole point.
Try it
Pocket Trip Planner is free to download, with Pro as an optional one-time unlock — no subscription, no account required. It now runs natively on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro.
The screenshots below show the rest of the story better than I can in words.
Screenshots
