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Ghostmoon.app – The Swiss Army Knife for your macOS menu bar

https://www.mgrunwald.com/ghostmoon/
60•mgrunwald_•1h ago

Comments

subdomain•1h ago
Seems really useful -- I love the website design!
mgrunwald_•27m ago
I'm very glad you like it! Thanks!
vivid242•1h ago
Lovely! Would appreciate a release via the App Store / notarization or so… is there a newsletter so I could get notified?
woadwarrior01•1h ago
This reminds of a similar windows shareware system tray app from ~25 years ago called Genius.
jofzar•1h ago
Interestingly to me this is what raycast actually is for me now. Most of my common workflows are just raycast keybinds now or quickly typed in.

An example is I have my airpods bound to ctrl+alt+b to connect via Bluetooth. This is to have it yank back control from my android phone.

nehal3m•1h ago
Hmm, green account, no comments or submissions, generated website for an unsigned app with power user features. That’s a no from me dawg.
xattt•1h ago
There are only two donors, and one of them sounds like an Amazon review?
mgrunwald_•58m ago
The donors are 100% real, early supporters of the app.
menno-dot-ai•1h ago
I'm getting an invalid SSL certificate too to complete the bingo card
mgrunwald_•59m ago
The SSL certificate is issued through Cloudflare. What issues are you having?
mgrunwald_•1h ago
Understandable! This is a pre-release of the app. You can come back later when everything is in place and the app is officially released, signed and notarized :)
nehal3m•57m ago
The idea seems cool so I’ll keep an eye on it, but as a paranoid sysadmin I’ll wait for the flags to turn green.
virajk_31•57m ago
That should not be a problem. I also used to just skim through posts and comments here without really interacting.
nehal3m•55m ago
It’s not a show stopper on it’s own, but taking everything together raises my eyebrows
gsibble•56m ago
Yep, this is a no from me.
foltik•29m ago
You forgot closed source. It’s a closed source dropdown menu.
ctmnt•1h ago
This looks cool enough, but it’s starting to drive me crazy how people are in such a rush to put out their macOS apps they can’t be bothered to get a developer account and run a one line command. It’s not hard.

I used to be sympathetic to complaints about not wanting to pay the developer account fee. But when you’re vibe coding, you’re probably paying a good chunk of change to your LLM supplier of choice every month, and the yearly developer account fee seems minor in comparison

Also, it’s just such a bad security precedent. This page describes the error you get as “the typical macOS Gatekeeper warning”, as though it were just another piece of corporate silliness, like clicking through a EULA.

71bw•1h ago
The truth is that Gatekeeper should go the way of the devil.

It is my machine and I paid for it, why does the OS care about what I do with it? The only thing this leads to is making sure your customers grow into good little lemmings.

newsclues•1h ago
I want to be a power user on my Mac, I don’t want my mom’s Mac to function like my devbox.

People like and need the apple sandbox. Others need an unlocked *nix machines

TeMPOraL•30m ago
It's fine as long as both exist and third parties are not allowed to know which one you're running.

Otherwise, you have banks and MAFIAA and others off-loading their own security and compliance costs to users by flat out discriminating based on the status of the sandbox.

jacobrast•1h ago
So that you don't accidentally run malware. MacOS is not iOS, you can run unsigned code if you really want to, but it will make you jump through a few hoops.
71bw•31m ago
How is this better than trying to eliminate the problem between the keyboard and the computer? The user won't learn if the computer handholds them through everything.
anamexis•25m ago
Because the vast majority of users have no interest in learning how to safely vet apps and just want to easily use their computers and not worry about malware.
alsetmusic•16m ago
> The user won't learn

Full stop. I still talk to people every working day who don't realize that rebooting a computer is actually a real troubleshooting step. They seem to think it's bunk tech support mumbo jumbo rather than a genuinely useful step. It's 2026 and they're still surprised when that works.

piva00•56m ago
You can do whatever you want if you are a power user, the tools are there to get around Gatekeeper.

For everyone else it's probably sane to have it, works as a decent filter so someone not tech-savvy don't get hurt by installing malware disguised as an app, one would just need to state incredible features that almost any normal user would like to have, and make them click to install. Gatekeeper diminishes that risk by a lot unless you learn how to bypass it, which requires you having decent skills and probably wouldn't fall for the bullshit that malware apps try to bait people with.

0x3f•59m ago
If you don't want your name, address, phone number on public display you need to either set up a company or set up some forwarding. If you set up a company, you'll need to get a DUNS number. If you haven't done it before and don't know about the secret shortcut way to do that, it is very annoying to get one.

Anyway, I don't see a problem with getting it out the door. People can just choose not to install it if they don't like it. I mean that's the whole idea of being early anyway, isn't it? Don't like a crappy bodged together UI? Don't like a lack of support? Don't like an unsigned app? You can wait until it has those things according to your preferences. In the meantime, the creator gets real users and feedback ASAP.

throwaway290•55m ago
It's free so why not just publish it on github then so that people could read the code and compile it themselves.

Right now it's closed source binary with a big fat "DOWNLOAD FOR FREE" button and instructions casually telling you to disable the last barrier between your system and persistent malware. Nobody should recommend this to anybody

0x3f•53m ago
Well, depends what the author's plans are for the future. Maybe it's not always going to be free as in beer, either.
vyaa•53m ago
Secret shortcut?!?
0x3f•51m ago
I don't know how obvious it is these days, but the default path through D&B's website is the terrible one. They will try to extract money from you and harass you forever. You had to find Apple's own embedded form for it by using their search and going through some flow.
mgrunwald_•46m ago
Thank you for saying this! As stated on the website, this is a pre-release. Those who are not sure, absolutely do not have to install this and can wait for the official, notarized release. In the meantime, the app gets tested in the real world.
moralestapia•35m ago
>secret shortcut

I see vagueposting has found its way into HN.

0x3f•21m ago
I haven't done it in a while, so didn't want to give out possibly wrong directions, but:

> I don't know how obvious it is these days, but the default path through D&B's website is the terrible one. They will try to extract money from you and harass you forever. You had to find Apple's own embedded form for it by using their search and going through some flow.

mcjiggerlog•19m ago
You don't need to do any of that to sign and notarize an app that you are distributing yourself.
eviks•54m ago
> and the yearly developer account fee seems minor in comparison

Do you not realize that spending money on other useful services makes it harder, not easier, to waste on dev fees?

mgrunwald_•52m ago
Gatekeeper and notarization are not silliness. They exist for a reason. I thought it would be a good idea to release the app during development when I am sure that it works correctly and then maybe get some feedback from early users.
s3p•49m ago
I guess OP's point is still pretty valid though, what's the harm in signing and notarizing it?
LatencyKills•20m ago
Ex-Apple macOS/Xcode dev here.

I just downloaded your app and ran it through hopper. There is a LOT of embedded Apple Script. I would never run an app like this with SIP disabled or without an active network blocker.

Your app requires direct access to major OS components: code signing, even during alpha should be a requirement.

user3939382•26m ago
Gatekeeper is a travesty and assault on user freedom. Apple should not be in charge of what you run on your computer, at all. Any exception to this should be opt in. If a user wants to insert a third party between themselves and a programmer they can elect to do that.

Let’s not forget when Apple’s certificate server was down and suddenly you couldn’t launch apps on macOS, to say nothing of the abuse of user rights.

hspmn•13m ago
you're saying security should be optional and up to users?

lol

drfloyd51•7m ago
Users used their freedom to choose macOS. Gatekeeper is a desirable feature. They opted-in with their purchase.
karimf•15m ago
Totally agree. There are significantly more new apps being released. I've been visiting the /r/macapps subreddit and they're having trouble filtering new submissions. I generally like the direction that they're taking https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ryaeex/rmacapps_m...

Even though it's more troublesome to submit apps to App Store, it's one signal that the app is not a malware.

foltik•13m ago
Except it is just another piece of corporate silliness.

Why don’t you purchase your own developer account and sign it yourself if you trust it? Or are you saying them paying Apple $100/yr in perpetuity is what will make you trust it?

apples_oranges•1h ago
Nice, but, and this is not personal, I would not trust this app with my computer internals. Probably also asks for sudo from time to time.. but I might ask Claude to make something similar for myself.. (sorry but just being honest)
mgrunwald_•23m ago
Understandable. Yes, it asks for sudo from time to time, but it is designed to be as safe as possible in what it does.
vladde•1h ago
the website design is cool as h*ck
mgrunwald_•27m ago
Thanks!
gsibble•1h ago
Yeah, I'm not trusting some app like that randomly on my computer.
mgrunwald_•28m ago
Understandable! You can come back later when everything is in place and the app is officially released, signed and notarized :)
qn9n•54m ago
This is cool but most of this stuff for me is just set and forget, I rarely need to change those things so frequently I need it in my menu bar.
RicDan•52m ago
Interesting how posts like these seem to be catapulted to #1 spot so quickly
geerlingguy•21m ago
Along with a number of posts praising the "website design". Besides novel designs (I think of Acko.net) it's not often I see comments on that here.
pieterhg•50m ago
Awesome. Can you add extra bright mode like Vivid? I'd love to get rid of Vivid cause it's so buggy and never re-enables after I close my MacBook Pro
antryu•34m ago
The pricing debate is interesting. I'm running a similar service and found that giving away as much as possible for free helps build initial trust — getting people to actually try it once is the hardest part.

Pre-release feedback from the community is definitely valuable though. I didn't know this part is the most diffcult.

fouc•31m ago
in your "demo" image the menu bar is completely missing.. this seems like a very confusing choice. I can barely make out the menu bar icon against the background image.
alsetmusic•21m ago
I get that there's a market to put command line preferences in a GUI wrapper, but wasn't HN going to limit posts from new accounts? Oh, it's not in Show HN. They found a loophole.

Meanwhile, I'm running Claude Code and asking it to make me stupid bespoke things that only I want and I'm not spamming the internet with those tools because they aren't novel or useful for most people and you can have Claude Code build a version for the way that you work.

Go away, green accounts. Everyone is pretty tired of your presence.

mgrunwald_•13m ago
Not really just command line preferences. The app has many more features that use native macOS APIs. But thanks for your comment!