Disk Info available on the Mac App Store

TL;DR

I have again an active Apple Developer Membership, thus Disk Info is back on the Mac App Store.

Sources: https://github.com/dgellow/DiskInfo

Back in 2015 I got a used MacBook Pro for a very good price and started to use it as my main machine. Moving back from ArchLinux on a ThinkPad x230 to a MacBook Pro was in general a very good experience, for example the upgrade to a high density display was the best thing ever, but it didn't take long to be frustrated by some simple things I got accustomated to as part of my Linux experience.

One small thing I really don't like in macOS is how annoying it is to know how much free space is available in my main drive. That's clearly not a huge deal, just:

  1. Open Finder
  2. Locate the drive
  3. Right click
  4. Select "Get Info"
  5. Locate the available disk space

Slightly annoying, but nothing too bad, only for the reason that I found myself checking my available space multiple times a week! It quickly became a pain to repeat those steps again and again. The machine has 250GB which isn't that much when doing some development related tasks, add to this some video and music files, a few games, or other media and you're now always asking yourself roughly how much space you have — 20% used? 90% used? 100% used? Somehow I feel the need to know if things have to be cleaned up or not. I may be extra anxious about this but I always find it annoying when I have to click on a bunch of UI just to know what resources are available on my machines.

So, all this introduction to present my solution to this problem, Disk Info.

You can find lot of utilities in the macOS world to get information about your disks but they often give you way more information that what I personally want, consume resoruces, and don't look that nice. And at the time I wanted to see how hard it could be to create simple macOS tools. So in October 2015 I created this small menu bar item that just do one single thing: it tell you how much free space you have available. And that's it. Always available in your menu bar, just one click and you have the information. I personally use it all the time since ~5 years now, and I love it!

It's written in less than 100 lines of Swift (only time I used the language so I'm sure it could be improved), it almost doesn't use any resources, and has support for both light and dark mode (i.e: the icon exists in both black and white).

Now you may ask yourself why I'm doing this post now in 2020 if the tool has been released in 2015. One reason: because of Apple's €100/year for distributing software on their store. I had for 1 year an active membership as I was working on projects for iOS and published Disk Info on the app store at the time, but then the membership expired. Just a few days ago I reactivated my membership to release HabitCat, as a side effect Disk Info is back to the store 😁.

I took the time to release a new update to use latest Swift and SDK versions, and try to improve the store listing, though it was already running well. If you try it out, I would be interested to get some feedbacks, I always like to know when people use stuff I create 😉.