I built another Mac app

It’s called Hush. A mac app that makes it easier to focus.

Over my entire career, I’ve entertained various ways to “get in the zone” as I sit down to work. In the early 2010s it was classical music, which worked pretty well because it had no words. From around 2014 to 2019 it was podcasts, mostly Joe Rogan, and I still don’t know how I got anything done with two guys talking in my ear for three hours. What finally stuck for me was generated noise.

Two kinds in particular. Brown noise, which has a deep rumble with a wider spectrum of sound… it kinda sounds like you’re sitting next to a giant waterfall (as a meditating monk would). And “speech blocker,” which is noise shaped to sit on top of the frequencies of a human voice, this works great in public spaces and when my daughter’s blasting Ms Rachel at home.

I found the challenge was never finding these sounds. There are a myriad of websites that will quickly generate noise for you. It was that they lived in a browser tab. Every time I wanted to get in the zone, I had to find the tab, or open the app, or switch from one sound to the other, and by then I’d already got distracted by Twitter or some YouTube tab I left open.

What Hush does

Hush lives in your Mac menu bar. Right-click the icon and the noise starts. Right-click again and it stops. Left-click for the controls: pick brown noise or the speech blocker, set the volume, and adjust the low-pass cutoff on brown noise if you want it deeper or lighter.

It’s fully offline. There are no audio files; both sounds are generated in real time. It’s fast, CPU-friendly, and Apple notarized (so it just opens without the dance of allowing unsigned software on your laptop).

Download Hush. Pay what you want, and $0 is fine. The source is on GitHub under MIT if you’d rather build it yourself.

Who’s using it

A few friends have been running it since the first build in May as beta testers, and a lot of what’s in the app today came from their feedback. (e.g. I eliminated white and pink noise as options because no one used it… and white noise is particularly ear piercing if you’re wearing headphones). Since it went public last weekend, strangers have started downloading it too, which is exciting.

Try it

If you’ve been keeping a noise tab open for years like I was, run Hush for a week and tell me whether it helped you focus.

Thanks for reading!