Macos

MiniMusic is my little menu bar app for controlling Apple Music from the keyboard: global hotkey, type, return, music. The new release, MiniMusic 26.716.1, is the biggest one yet, because the search box got a brain. Search that understands what you meant Until now, search did what search boxes do: match the characters you typed. The new version runs every query through Apple’s on-device Foundation Models first — the same Apple Intelligence stack that powers Writing Tools — and turns it into a structured search intent before hitting the Apple Music API. Everything happens on the Mac itself: no cloud round-trip, nothing leaves the machine, and it works on a plane. ...

MiniMusic is a little menu bar app I built to scratch my own itch: a fast, keyboard-driven way to control Apple Music without leaving whatever I’m working on. Hit a global hotkey, a dropdown appears under the menu bar icon, search my library or the catalog, hit return, and the music plays. It lives in the menu bar, ships updates through Sparkle, and otherwise stays out of the way. I upgraded to macOS 27 (Golden Gate) and two things were suddenly broken: the global hotkey did nothing, and album artwork stopped showing up. What I expected to be a quick afternoon of patches turned into a genuinely interesting tour of how SwiftUI’s menu bar support has aged. I worked through it with Claude Code, which was especially useful here because a lot of the debugging was empirical—build, run, observe, repeat—rather than something you can reason out from the docs. ...