Imperator RetroPong

// Overview

Pong that lives in the macOS menu bar. Click the icon, a panel drops down with a CRT-filtered court, and you play until someone reaches five.

// Install

Download the latest zip from Releases, unzip, and move Imperator RetroPong.app to /Applications.

The app is signed with a self-signed certificate and is not notarized, so Gatekeeper blocks the first launch. Right-click the app and choose Open, or clear the quarantine flag:

Requires macOS 13 or later, Apple silicon. Built and tested on macOS 27 only — older versions are expected to work but have not been verified.

Install at your own risk. The app is not notarized and carries no Apple Developer signature, so macOS cannot vouch for it. It is provided as is, with no warranty, under the MIT license.

// Permissions

None. The app requests no Accessibility, Input Monitoring, Automation, or privacy-gated grants, and declares no NSUsage keys.

The one system integration is Open at Login, the toggle in the panel footer. It calls SMAppService.mainApp.register(), which adds the app to Login Items in System Settings. macOS may show a notification the first time. Turning the toggle off unregisters it.

// Use

Click the menu bar icon to open the panel. The game starts as soon as it is visible and pauses the moment it closes, so nothing runs in the background. Escape closes it, and so does a click anywhere outside.

Move the mouse left and right over the court to drive the bottom paddle. The AI plays the top one. First to five points wins.

The header row holds the controls:

The footer row holds the rest:

The ball speeds up on every paddle hit, from 280 up to a ceiling of 550. Sound is generated at runtime as square waves — there are no audio files in the bundle.

The whole court runs through a CRT layer: scanlines, an RGB subpixel grid, flicker, a VHS tracking band, noise, and an occasional screen jitter.

// Build from source

Builds release, bundles, codesigns, installs to /Applications, and launches. Other targets:

Signing uses the self-signed Imperator Dev identity by default. Override it:

Built with Xcode 27 and Swift 6.4 against the macOS 27 SDK, with the minimum staying at macOS 13. AppKit decides which generation of a control to draw from the SDK field in the binary's LC_BUILD_VERSION, and SwiftPM writes that field from the deployment target rather than the SDK it compiled against, so a plain swift build stamps sdk 13.0 and the app draws macOS 13 era controls on macOS 27. The Makefile stamps the real SDK at link time instead, so the minimum stays low and the controls stay current.

// Release

Build a zip without touching git or the remote:

Cut a full release — bumps Info.plist, commits, tags vx.y.z, pushes, and publishes a GitHub release with the zip attached:

Requires the GitHub CLI (brew install gh, then gh auth login). The working tree must be clean. Tags are plain semver (vx.y.z); the release title carries the app name. CFBundleVersion is set from git rev-list --count HEAD and is never edited by hand.

// Implementation note

A SwiftPM executable with no dependencies. LSUIElement is true, so there is no Dock icon and no menu bar menu — the status item is the entire interface. The game is a SpriteKit scene hosted inside SwiftUI through NSViewRepresentable; mouse input is captured with a local event monitor and forwarded to the scene.

The surface under the menu bar is a borderless NSPanel the app draws itself, not an NSPopover. macOS 27 draws its own menu bar panels as plain rounded rectangles with no arrow and no open or close animation, and NSPopover draws neither that shape nor that corner and exposes no radius to set.

Because SwiftPM does not compile asset catalogs, the menu bar glyph is drawn in code rather than shipped as an image, at 18pt for the status item and 16pt beside the name in the panel header.