Ahem

A macOS utility app for checking your mic and audio before a call, quickly and easily.

What it does

Before an important call, it's a good idea to check that your mic and headphones sound right.

Instead of opening a voice recording app, playing music or a YouTube video, Ahem lives in your menu bar. Click the icon and you get a popover where you can easily:

• Play a test tone to check your speakers or headphones.
• Check your mic level in real time.
• Record a short test clip and play it back to hear how you actually sound.
• Switch input and output devices without opening System Settings.

All audio processing happens locally. Nothing gets saved, and no data leaves your device.

Design details

A few things I spent time on:

• The mic level meter shows words like "Good" or "Loud" instead of dB numbers, because most people just want to know if their mic sounds right.
• A status dot changes colour with signal intensity, so you can tell at a glance whether the mic is picking up sound.
• When the mic is live but quiet, a faint shimmer on the meter communicates "listening" without being distracting.
• Green and orange text uses adaptive colours that stay readable regardless of your desktop wallpaper bleeding through the popover's vibrancy.
• The mic permission flow uses a pre-permission prompt before triggering the system dialog, to avoid a race condition where the popover closes mid-dialog and leaves the mic active.

How I built it

I used Claude Code for almost all of the code. I described what the app should do, reviewed what came back, and decided what to keep, what to change, and what to throw away.

The design was mine. Layout, interaction patterns, the popover behaviour, how permission states work, the level meter with human-readable labels instead of raw dB values. I made those decisions the same way I would on any product. Claude Code handled the implementation.

Status

Ahem is currently going through Apple's review process. It should be available in the App Store soon.