From the very first build, opening Pulse asked for a licence key before it would do anything at all. No demo, no trial, nothing for new users. My reasoning felt principled at the time: a demo is a hole in the thing that asks for money, and I did not want a half version of the app floating around being judged.
What actually happened is that new people downloaded the DMG, opened it, met a wall, and closed it. I was asking strangers to pay for something they had never once seen running on their own Mac. The notch is a personal piece of screen. Nobody can tell from a screenshot whether they want something living in it.
I mdae Pulse, a small Mac app that turns the MacBook notch into something useful: now playing, meeting controls, clipboard, weather, focus timer, AirDrop shelf, battery, system stats. It lives in the dead pixels you already paid for.
1.2 shipped this week, and it is the first release where I did almost no deciding. I read the emails, counted what people kept asking for, and built those three things.
Pulse Island
