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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 DropExternal link. We have another blog post on our saga to get Bluetooth headphones to work with Mic Drop in macOS MontereyExternal link.

Open source libraries

For open-source libraries used in Mic Drop, see the credits page.

We use a customised version of both KeyHolderExternal link and MagnetExternal link, 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 (NautilusExternal link). The source code for this siteExternal link 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.)

We send out a newsletter sporadically—usually around once a quarter. Expect general updates, new things we’re working on, and invitations to beta programmes when we’re ready to test a new app.

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