Orbit · Tools · September 2026
The record sleeve, back on my desk
Spindle. A native macOS album-art widget for Spotify and Apple Music, with hover controls and a mini player that lives around the notch.
Album art used to be something you held while the music played. On a Mac the closest thing is a small widget that shows the cover of whatever is playing. The good ones exist, and they are good, but they cost a little more than I think such a small utility should.
So I wrote my own. Spindle puts the album art on the desktop as a tile. Hover over it and the controls appear. A second mini player sits around the notch at the top of the screen and expands when the pointer comes near.
There are no API keys and no logins. Every second, a short AppleScript asks Spotify or Music what is playing, and the answer is all Spindle needs.
The most useful lesson was a dull one. Swift swallows AppleScript syntax errors into vague failures at runtime, so I now test every script on its own in the terminal before it goes anywhere near the app.
Spindle comes with a seven-day trial and a licence check that works offline, at a lower price than the widgets that inspired it.
Made with Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit, AppleScript.
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