App · Swift
Needle
A macOS menu-bar remote for my home music server, with a record that really turns.
Needle drives the always-on server that plays a 263,600-song library through my amp. Click the level meter in the menu bar and a panel drops down with the record: when the server plays, the vinyl slides out of its sleeve and turns at a true 33⅓ rpm while the tonearm tracks the song.
It holds a live connection, so anything that happens on the server, from any device, shows up at once. Search answers artists and albums as you type from a local index of the library, and the keyboard media keys and Control Center drive the server while it plays.
It is careful with the hardware: it never wakes a sleeping drive for cover art, it puts the volume back when the amp output reopens at full volume, and it uses no CPU while hidden. Pure Swift with no dependencies, plus a mock server and a self-test that drives every control.
