Launching today
Wokyintosh
Turn a spare Mac display into a retro system dashboard!
55 followers
Turn a spare Mac display into a retro system dashboard!
55 followers
Wokyintosh is a free, open-source macOS dashboard inspired by the classic Macintosh. It combines a large clock and date, local weather, Apple Music and Spotify Now Playing with artwork, plus live CPU, RAM, SSD and network stats. I built it for my Wokyis M5 Retro Dock Station after months of not finding the dashboard I wanted — even among paid apps.
Wokyintosh
Could this work nicely on an older Mac that isn't powerful enough for everyday use but still has a good display?
Wokyintosh
@renly_borris Yes, potentially. Wokyintosh itself is fairly lightweight, so an older Mac could be a nice dedicated dashboard machine if it can run macOS 13 or later.
The main limitation is the OS requirement rather than raw performance. If the Mac is too old for macOS 13, the current version won’t run on it.
That’s actually a really interesting use case though; Turning an older Mac into a dedicated always-on dashboard!
The retro Mac-style look is a fun touch. It gives an old spare display a purpose instead of just letting it sit unused.
Wokyintosh
@robertspencer That’s exactly what I was going for. Giving an old or tiny spare display a real purpose was part of the fun, and the retro Mac style felt like the perfect match for it.
You asked for settings panel feedback, so the one I'd put above layout customization is idle cost. An always on dashboard that repaints the clock every frame keeps the GPU awake, and on a Mac mini nobody notices, but whoever runs this on a laptop's second display uninstalls it inside a week. Repainting once a second, and only when a value actually changed, is boring and it's the whole difference. Also the part I find more interesting than the retro look is that you vibe-coded a macOS app and then actually opened the repo, because the usual version of that story ends at the screenshot.
Wokyintosh
@asadmalik901 That’s really useful feedback; especially the idle cost point.
You’re right that an always-on dashboard has to be careful about unnecessary redraws, particularly on laptops. I’m going to look at reducing updates to only when values actually change, and keeping the clock refresh as low-cost as possible.
And thanks for the second point too. I didn’t want Wokyintosh to be just a nice screenshot or a one-off experiment; making the repo public and shipping something people can actually run was a big part of the goal for me.
Really appreciate the thoughtful feedback!
I like that it supports both Apple Music and Spotify. That makes it much more practical for different setups.
Wokyintosh
@nadeem_iqbal4 Thanks! That was exactly the idea. I didn’t want it to only work well for one music setup. Supporting both Apple Music and Spotify makes it much more flexible in real use.