jangles-byte/ramble

RAMble is a free native app for Macs that turns your computer's internal activity, like memory usage, CPU load, GPU activity, and any local AI models running on the machine, into glowing animations on your desktop. Instead of showing graphs or numbers, it gives you a living visual you can glance at to sense how hard your machine is working, similar to watching weather roll in. The app offers seven different animation styles. The flagship one, called Synapse, shows a neural network of glowing nodes and connections that pulse faster when a local AI model like Ollama is generating text. Others include Plinko, where falling marbles represent memory being allocated, Galaxy, a spinning star field that reacts to memory pressure, Water Tank, where rising water represents RAM usage, plus Motherboard, Factory, and Rain, each visualizing system load in its own way. Seven visual themes and an intensity slider let a person adjust how calm or busy the display looks. RAMble watches memory usage including swap, CPU usage per core, GPU utilization, disk read and write activity, and local AI tools such as Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM, and Open WebUI, showing bursts of activity when a model loads or generates text. It is built natively in Swift using Metal for graphics, works as a universal binary on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, and requires macOS 15 or newer. The app has no window and no dock icon, living entirely in the menu bar, and its overlay sits behind or in front of other windows without ever intercepting clicks or keystrokes. Installation is done either by downloading a prebuilt app and removing macOS's quarantine flag with a single terminal command, since the app is not notarized with a paid developer account, or by building it from source using Apple's command line developer tools, which takes about five minutes. The README describes the source as MIT spirited and notes it reads only public system counters and local network data, sending nothing off the machine and collecting no analytics.