Music

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. ...

Over the past couple days, I’ve been on a mission to clean up my music library in forScore, the sheet music reader I use on my iPad. What started as a simple organization project turned into building custom tooling and developing ideas for how forScore could better support power users and integrations. The real power tool here was Claude Code—Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. It handled the fuzzy matching logic to identify duplicates and normalize inconsistent names, helped build the Rust CLI from scratch, and iterated through the tricky parts like reverse-engineering forScore’s binary plist format. Tasks that would have taken me days of trial and error were done in hours. ...