Launching today
Shiny
Make your Mac feel brand new again.
4 followers
Make your Mac feel brand new again.
4 followers
Shiny is a menu-bar app designed to make your Mac feel like the day you bought it. It does this by freeing up memory and calming the background apps that have been chewing through your RAM all morning. A quiet indicator in the menu bar tells you when your Mac wants some relief with one click. No scary scans, no $40-a-year cleaner subscription. $4.99 once. No subscription, no account, no telemetry.
Solace
I built Shiny because most slow Macs aren't dying. They're just out of working room, and that's a fix you can do in one click.
By the afternoon, almost every Mac is hauling the same load: a browser with thirty tabs, Slack and Notes in the background, Zoom and Teams that grabbed half a gig of memory on the 10 AM call and never gave it back. macOS holds onto everything just in case, and what's left for what you actually want to do is whatever's still free. The Mac isn't broken; it just doesn't have anywhere to put the next thing.
From the user's end, that feels like a Mac that's "getting old". The honest fix is small. The dishonest one is a $40-a-year cleaner subscription warning you about malware you don't have, or a $1,500 new MacBook you don't need.
Shiny is the calm, honest version. A button in the menu bar. Click it, the working room comes back, the Mac feels new again.
I spent as long on how Shiny feels as on what it does. The indicator animates gently when memory is freed, like the Mac is letting out a small breath. There are no upsell popups, no nag screens, no "Shiny Pro" tier hiding the good features;
One click in the menu bar that frees inactive memory and closes the orphaned helpers some apps leave behind when they crash.
A quiet indicator and a warm glow at the edges of your screen when your Mac needs relief, so you feel the pressure rising instead of being shouted at by a popup.
Pause Apps tab that names every background app in plain English, so you can pause the ones eating memory you don't need.
Auto-relief that quietly acts on its own when pressure gets tight, so you don't have to remember to click.
Global shortcut so you can summon Shiny from any app without leaving what you're doing.
On pricing and privacy: $4.99 once. No subscription, no account, no telemetry, no analytics SDK inside the app, no cloud. Built natively with Swift and SwiftUI for macOS 13+. Sits in your menu bar, stays out of your way.
Honest scope: Shiny is not a CleanMyMac killer, and it's not for Macs that are mostly fine already. If your memory pressure stays green and your Mac feels quick, you don't need it. It's for the Mac that's been with you a couple of years and feels heavier than it used to, but isn't actually broken.
I've been using it on my own M1 Air daily for months. It's the kind of tool you set up once and then forget is there, which is exactly what I wanted it to be.
If your Mac has been feeling slow lately, I'd love for you to try Shiny. And whether or not you do, I'd be curious: what tipped the feeling over for you? Tabs piling up, conference calls eating memory, or just the slow drift of years?