Hard Drive activity indicator for the Mac: my first Swift app. Wrote it this morning because I wanted it. It monitors disk queues at 120Hz and triggers the LED for 10ms, which seems pretty realistic. What should I do with it? I pay the $100 Apple Developer tax, should... I put it on the app store for $1 or just stick it on my GitHub and hope people can figure it out?show more

Make it emit a screeching HDD sound like in the olden days

I think I'll do both! Put it on GitHub free for personal use, release a version on the App Store cheap for people that don't want to build it themselves!

Code and app:

Neither. You can notarize it, put it in a dmg and put that in S3 or something with a download link on your website. Everyone can download and install it, no problem. The App Store is a ridiculous tax on distribution of desktop apps that is totally unnecessary.

Would love to see a swift video, but make a homebrew repo for it. That’s how most devs install on Mac.

who needs branch prediction when doing both can work

Git plz, I will rate the effort to install for you. My skill level is slightly above duct tape eating python dev

Both. GitHub for the nerds, App Store for the people who just want the tiny blinking light back.

You sign it and create a brew cask and everyone can use it with 1 command. Just tell your clanker to do it, pretty straight forward, you don't need to ask anyone to approve anything.

Ha! I did the same thing but decided to open source it. Well, I’ve been working it for about 2 weeks… but now sharing with the community. Anyway, my vote is to open source oh GitHub! Check out my app if you’re a multi-profile web browser power user.

The funny part is that Apple already won here. A developer writes a tiny useful tool for his own machine and the immediate question is not "how do I share this?", but "which Apple-controlled hoop do I jump through?" That is the ecosystem working exactly as designed.

I can hear the clicking sound of the actuator arm from here

You could have an LLM construct a macOS .pkg and wrap it into a .dmg, then put it up for download.

Make it so that after 1k blinks we get a mandatory “I made task manager” pop up that we have to minimize by clicking “thanks king” and I’ll buy it right now 🙏🏻

The first TSR I ever wrote in DOS was a Norton Drive activity clone

Why not both?

Yup, we old folks need that. Reminds me of my floppy-drive switching setup before I got my first RLL 20 MB hard drive. Now add the floppy read/write sound and it’s perfect.

I want to hear the hard drive like its 1995!

You forgot on top of the $100 tax, you also get to pay them 30% of every dollar you make.

Ha put it on GitHub and I’ll use it, very cool

My off-topic question is: What the heck are modern operating systems doing so much so often that makes them hit the disk drives? Can't they move whatever they're polling into memory and do periodic writes? Or are they that unstable that they think they'll crash and become unrecoverable?

If you paid the $100, you may as well publish it. First for a price and eventually for free if there aren't enough buyers.

Absolutely do not ever want that constantly flashing on my screen.

Hey! Finder has one of these built in!

Needs a HD noise emulator feature. maybe a click of death when the accelerometer sees lots of excitement.

That’s awesome, can it have some audio as well that mimics different generations of HDDs? You’d make your $99 back on the App Store pretty quickly, but getting through the approval process the first time can feel a bit frustrating esp if you are a bit edgy with your API or entitlements.

Maybe as developer of open source Stats to fold it into his menubar stats app?

Please put it on the Mac Store for free, don’t charge. You’re reaching Russinovich levels here. Next app you come up with and make over a few coffees you can charge for.

You just gave away the whole app. Literally copy pasting this tweet and telling gpt 5.5 to make this.

Dave, you know what I found funny last night? I was training a CPU-based model from scratch and my indicator light was SOLID not a flicker for nearly an hour 🤣 I couldn't stop laughing it was the first time I'd seen so much light come from my front panel in years.

Cool! I vote GitHub open source with a notarized .dmg as release resource. What are your first impressions of the language?

If it’s doesn’t make hard drive noises and vibrate a bit I’m out lol

Yes, because we all need more lights flashing at us in our computers.

yes! and let's add some spinning hdd sounds! i've always missed those sounds, they make the computer feel like it's actually working