Show HN: Salary Ticker – a macOS menu bar app that ticks up your pay

5 points by steveharrison a month ago · 2 comments · 1 min read

Sometimes I need a bit of extra motivation to get through the work day, so made a little macOS menubar item where you put in your daily rate (you can make it whatever you want, pre/post-tax/etc.) and it then shows you how much you've earnt today so far.

I got Claude Code to also try to detect when the screen is being observed—it found a private macOS framework called SkyLight that has a function, `SLSIsScreenWatcherPresent`, that returns a boolean if any other process is observing the screen. It reckons that it's the same thing that Apple uses for the purple "screen is being observed" indicator. There’s a slight delay, but the masking triggers when I start screen recording (the very beginning of the recording needs trimming because of the delay).

You can also option-click the item to manually mask it.