Under the hood
How is Mic Drop built?
Mic Drop is a macOS application written entirely in Swift and SwiftUI. It uses Core Audio to manage mute and volume states. Mic Drop requires Input Monitoring permissions to listen for global keyboard shortcuts. ⌨️
We purposefully didn’t make use of any audio recording or microphone access APIs. This way, we can be certain that Mic Drop will never hear you or listen to you. (Privacy matters!) It only has access to your audio device IDs, their mute status, and their volume level. It never has access to the audio stream being received by your microphone, even if it’s on. 👌🏻
Mic Drop requires macOS 10.15 Catalina, because we wanted to try SwiftUI. It’s kinda cool and feels like “React for Swift”. SwiftUI has promise, but it’s very early-stages right now. 🤷🏻♂️
If you want to learn more, Matt wrote about the experience of building Mic Drop. We have another blog post on our saga to get Bluetooth headphones to work with Mic Drop in macOS Monterey.
Open source libraries
For open-source libraries used in Mic Drop, see the credits page.
We use a customised version of both KeyHolder and Magnet, both of which are available on GitHub. (Feel free to use them!)
How is this website built?
We built this website with Gatsby and our design system (Nautilus). The source code for this site is available on GitHub if you’re curious and/or want to see how many times we changed the shade of red used. (Spoiler alert: however many times you think sounds reasonable, it’s probably more than that.)