Development notes and technical write-ups from Jorvik Software.
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash If you use more than one or two of these apps, your Mac has spent the week quietly updating them. That is a lot of update prompts and very little explanation, so here is what actually changed. Most of it is one fix, made once in the shared code and rolled out everywhere. Settings windows now fit what is in them Every Jorvik app draws its settings from the same…
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash Lookout is a menu-bar app with one job: tell me when something on GitHub needs me. Mentions, review requests, failing builds, issues on my own repositories. A pill in the menu bar goes red, I click it, I deal with whatever it is. On Thursday someone opened three pull requests on QuitProtect . Lookout said nothing. It carried on saying nothing on Friday and…
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash ASCII Saver turns your camera feed into live ASCII art and shows it when you walk away from your Mac. It needs the camera to do that, obviously. What it should not do is keep the camera running after your displays have gone to sleep. It did, following the conversion from screensaver to menu-bar app . What was wrong The app already handled this properly in every…
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash QuitProtect stops you quitting an app by accident. You press command Q , nothing happens, and you get on with your life. Press it twice, or hold it, and the app quits as normal. It is about ninety lines of interesting code wrapped in a menu-bar icon, and it has been quietly doing its job since March. On Thursday somebody I have never met opened three pull…
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash RainbowApple is the smallest thing I ship. It puts the 1977 six-colour Apple logo back where it belongs — over the grey one in the corner of your menu bar — and then it does nothing else, forever. There is no feature roadmap. There is no second screen. The entire product is one glyph, painted correctly, in exactly the right place. Which means when…
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash ASCII Saver renders your camera feed as live ASCII art. It has done since March. Version 2.0 doesn’t change a single pixel of what it draws — and it’s the biggest release the thing has had, because it changes what it is . It used to be a screensaver. Now it’s an app. Here’s why that was the only sane direction, and what fell out of…
Photo by David Goldman on Unsplash The whole Jorvik catalogue is on Homebrew as of this weekend. Twenty-four apps, games and screen savers, each one a line in a terminal: brew install --cask perpetualbeta/jorvik/menutidy No download page, no unzip, no dragging anything to Applications, no right-click-open dance. It fetches, verifies the checksum, and puts the app where it belongs. That’s the…
Citadel — the boot-up terminal, and the logo of a company you are not yet supposed to be suspicious of Citadel is out. It is a first-person shooter for the Mac, in the Doom idiom, and it is the ground war of the story that started with Strataris . That game was the air war — you flew low over six colony worlds and held the sky against a marauder fleet for as long as you could. You did…
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash Most of what I do to these little menu-bar apps never earns a headline. A control that was hard to see. A feature someone asked for. A thing macOS quietly broke on a Tuesday. This is a roundup of the recent small stuff across two of them — MenuTidy and ActiveSpace — and the short stories behind each change, because the why is usually more…
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash I keep a small dashboard running that watches this website for me. Is it up? Does the sitemap still match what’s actually on disk? Are the update feeds live? And, once a night, the unglamorous one: are there any dead links — anywhere on the site — quietly rotting? One morning it told me there was. One broken link, on one page. The page was a post…