First day, first run, not like the average honeymoon phase!

What’s up folks? this is Atharva known online as FiniteCode.

This project is about building a macOS Power Information Utility, wherein the user can view live stats of power consumption and intake for their macbooks (and potentially macs too).

This project is gonna be interesting, this is probably my 3rd or 4th time attempting to work with Swift, it has always been fun.

Hidden APIs

macOS itself doesn’t natively broadcast a lot of the power information to the Applications, and so you have to go through hidden system APIs.

This is one of the reasons why such Power Management apps are never on the App Store but on sources like Homebrew or Github.

The Setup

Today I spent over 30minutes setting up my time tracking with Wakatime and connecting it to Stardance metrics, and submitted my IDs for verification.

It was after these basics where I started my research on the hidden APIs I talked about earlier, which for the base for the application, I utilized Gemini and Claude for researching on the same and my findings revealed an IOKitFramework called powermetrics which provides many C functions like:

IOReportCopyChannelsInGroup, IOReportMergeChannels, IOReportCreateSubscription, IOReportCreateSamples, and IOReportCreateSamplesDelta.

The goal will be to use these functions and as much more data as available to build on this app.

Design

I was thinking of making a Cyberpunk-esque design but honestly I’m not sure if I can do this, so we’ll come back to this one some time soon, for now the core focus is on the functionality.

Screenshots

I made the basic menu-bar app and setup Xcode and hence attached some screenshots, feel free to have a look.

Join me in this journey, where I’ll try to make something useful, something fun XD