Taking Jedmunds advice on using actual Mac window elements to make the design feel more real or be able to see it in context. I simplified the colors a bit, but not that much, but definitely feels a bit easier for sure than with the brown palette I had played with before. I am aiming for this to be a utility app, inspired by other apps, and that means restricting it's size. I tried to make this work for a larger window size but it felt like a lot was missing and there is more design thinking to be done there, and, since I wanted to keep this design exercise more focused I felt that this restriction is good.

I like what I've mixed up here. The window bar has a pretty useless element (repetitive maybe) - but somehow I really like it and want to explore it a bit more...I had an interesting idea for how to make this app feel a bit more alive by showing an animating border around the large action button, but I don't know how to do this in Figma so I am looking at some tutorials right now (or frankly said I am not entirely sure what it is I want to show).

I really like this direction. It's definitely still missing some coherence but I feel I progressed. Adding the window elements definitely made it better.

It's also a bit frustrating seeing though how simple this application is and I can't manage to make it look decent. I am looking at other applications, and I am starting to wonder if I should just adopt the native Mac elements to give it a bit more...coherence for a lack of a better word.

Anyways, this is what I wanted to check in with. I will keep exploring ideas.