Why I built a Pong game that lives in your menu bar

Hey PH!

I'm Leo. A few months ago I noticed something kind of dumb about my workflow: every time I hit build in Xcode, I'd just… sit there. Staring. Sometimes I'd open Twitter and lose 20 minutes. Sometimes I'd start reading something and forget what I was even doing. Those 30-60 second gaps were killing my focus way more than the wait itself. So I started building Mini Pong as a weekend project. The idea was simple: a tiny Pong game in the menu bar. One click to play, click away and it pauses. No window switching, no losing your place. Just a quick rally while your code compiles.

What started as a weekend thing turned into something I genuinely use every day. Along the way it grew into 8 game modes (some are kind of ridiculous, Chaos mode is my favorite), a ranked mode with Game Center leaderboards, controller support, 9 languages… all in about 1 MB. It's 100% native Swift + SpriteKit, sandboxed, no analytics, no accounts.

Just a little arcade game that respects your time. Launching tomorrow on PH and honestly I'm a bit nervous, first launch as a solo dev.

Quick question: what do you actually do during compile times? I'm sure we all have weird little rituals.