Meeting Buddy – a small friend to remind you to attend meetings on time

Meeting Buddy is a meeting reminder application for macOS, living neatly on the menu bar. Instead of a notification banner that scrolls by and then disappears, a cute mascot will parachute down from the menu bar to the screen, bringing the meeting name and a join button, then flies back to its original place.

The problem Meeting Buddy solves

When you're focused on coding, designing, or writing documents in full-screen mode, calendar notifications can easily be swallowed by Focus mode or pass by without you having a chance to read them. The result is arriving late to meetings or missing them altogether. Meeting Buddy turns reminders into a moment that's hard to overlook but still pleasant, without startling you.

Main features

- Meeting reminders with animation: the mascot parachutes down before the meeting time (2, 5, 10, or 15 minutes as you choose), without blocking your actions. Hover over it to keep the mascot around for reading detailed information.

- Join meetings with a click: automatically detects Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex links in calendar events.

- Hard mode: for important meetings, reminders take over the entire screen until you choose to Join, Snooze (1–15 minutes), or Skip.

- "Today" popover: click on the mascot on the menu bar to see the entire meeting schedule for the day along with a to-do list with time reminders.

- Access permissions: the application only requests read access to your Calendar. All data stays on your machine, no account required, nothing uploaded to any server.

Who should use it

Programmers, designers, product managers, and knowledge workers with 3–8 meetings a day, often working in fullscreen and frequently missing notifications. Especially useful for remote workers who meet continuously across different platforms.

How to get started

Meeting Buddy runs on macOS 14 Sonoma and later, supporting both Mac Apple Silicon and Intel.

1. Download Meeting Buddy from the Mac App Store.

2. Open the app and grant Calendar access.

3. Select the calendars you want to track (iCloud, Google, Outlook… that have been added to the macOS Calendar app).

4. Done! The mascot appears on the menu bar and will remind you before each meeting.

What sets it apart

Other calendar reminder applications only use system notifications or dry pop-up windows. Meeting Buddy brings a "living" character on your machine: it breathes, blinks, sleeps when idle, and parachutes down when there’s a task. Being reminded becomes a pleasant experience instead of a nuisance. The application is lightweight (almost 0% CPU when idle), respects macOS's reduce motion mode, and stays silent when you're sharing your screen.