Free stuff I built the past few weeks

I always forget to promote things I build. I'm going to try to make a post regularly with just a quick overview of that.

These are all projects that try to scratch and itch I have. Not much polish, just quick solutions to quick problems.

A recurring theme in the batch below is that they're pretty much all menu bar apps for macOS. I love to have my apps out of the way, but reachable.

DivoomAlbumArt

This one is pretty niche, but I have this pixel art display hanging on my wall that can display various things like weather info, and animated gifs. It's a fun piece of tech, but it gets boring kinda quick.

I wondered if it would be possible to show the album art of your currently playing music on there, and after some hacking it was!

I went ahead and built a simple UI for it that lives in your menubar.

(I actually started on this 18 months ago, but got distracted somewhere along the way 🫠)

Installation is simple if you have Homebrew:

brew install --cask TimBroddin/tap/divoomalbumart

Or you can download the latest release on GitHub.

Portie

Not knowing what (web) projects I have running, and which ports they run on happens to me all the time. That's why I build another very simple tool for this.

You give it some ports to watch, and it will tell you which one are currently listening, and what process and page title they return.

Installation is simple if you have Homebrew:

brew install --cask TimBroddin/tap/portie

Or you can download the latest release on GitHub.

GitStatus

Most of the time I work at home, but sometimes I work a day at a client. Something that has happened way too many times is that I worked on something before leaving, and forgot to push this.

This happened to me yesterday, so I quickly wrote yet another menubar utility to prevent this.

GitStatus watches your git repositories, and keeps track which one are ahead/behind their remote, and which ones have uncommited changes.

Installation is simple if you have Homebrew:

brew install --cask TimBroddin/tap/gitstatus

Or you can download the latest release on GitHub.

Cloud Build Notifier

Yet another menubar utility that allows you to watch your Google Cloud Builds. People who need this will know, the rest can praise themselves happy that they don't need Google Cloud.

I've yet to add it to my Homebrew tap, but you can download it on GitHub.

I'm also turning this into a real App Store app with easier authentication, but Google verification takes time.

krankie

Choosing the right keywords for your apps on the App Store is big business, and there are a lot of tools available to track your keyword ranking, like Astro and Appfigures.

However, these tools don't work well together with agentic AI. I want to be able to tell an AI: "look at the metadata of my app, look at the competitors, see which keywords are valuable, and optimize my app store presence". In theory, since an AI agent has a longer attention span than myself, this should be able to give some pretty decent results.

I tried to get there by writing my own MCP server to query Astro data, but MCP kinda sucks as it eats a lot of tokens.

Since AI agents are really good at using CLI tools, I created Krankie (keyword rankie), a tool for keyword tracking aimed at agents.

With krankie, an agent can easily search for an app, track keywords, and install a crontab to fetch keyword rankings every night. Using that data it can do research on how make your ASO better.

It's all early days, but it works, and even comes with a basic TUI for humans:

You can use this tool by installing Bun and running:

bunx krankie

Or by telling your agent "use krankie (bunx krankie instructions)".

I'm working on the next version which will have support for ratings & reviews, and which will come with a web UI for humans.

Raybun

I use Spatie's Ray extensively, it's the must have tool when you're debugging PHP - and since I wrote the CMS for this blog, I spend a lot of time in it.

One thing I don't like about it, is that is can become very slow if you send it a lot of logs. Like really, a lot.

That's why I asked Claude to look at how Ray works (the libraries to send logs are open-source), and help me build a fast Bun alternative.

It's easy to run and it's much faster: bunx raybun-cli

After creating this I discovered that Spatie was working on a new version: Ray 3. This new version is also very fast, and much nicer to look at, so buying Ray is still the best thing to do.

But if you need a quick tool to glance at your logs, Raybun could be an alternative.