ttalkak (딸깍)

English · 한국어

Three tiny macOS menu bar apps that each do exactly one thing. Left-click acts immediately — no menu drops down, no confirmation.

ttalkak (딸깍) is the Korean onomatopoeia for a click.

App	Left-click	Permissions
AudioFix — speaker with a warning badge	Restarts coreaudiod — fixes crackling audio and output devices that won't connect	Admin password (can be waived, opt-in)
ThemeToggle — half-filled circle	Switches between Dark and Light appearance	Automation (System Events)
MicRecorder — filled microphone	Starts / stops recording	Microphone, Downloads folder

Right-click (or control-click) opens a small settings menu.

The icon is the state. ThemeToggle fills the half of the circle that matches the current appearance; AudioFix spins a refresh arrow while it restarts; MicRecorder is a microphone when idle and a solid red dot while recording. Elapsed time and status messages live in the tooltip and the right-click menu only — putting text in the menu bar widens the item, and a widened item gets pushed off the menu bar entirely. (why)

The icons are drawn in an explicit black or white rather than as template images. A template image in the menu bar is drawn at roughly 40 % of the strength macOS gives its own items, which makes a third-party icon look washed out next to Wi-Fi and Control Center. (why)

Every app's right-click menu has a Pin to the right end of the menu bar toggle. When items overflow, macOS drops the leftmost ones, so the right end — next to Control Center — is the only spot that survives on a notched MacBook with no external display attached. Turning it on moves the icon there and keeps it there on every launch; turning it off puts the icon back where it was before you pinned it.

MicRecorder ships with it on, because a recording indicator you cannot see is useless. The other two default to off. ⌘-drag still works as usual while the toggle is off.

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Requirements

• macOS 14.0+ (Apple Silicon)
• Xcode command line tools (xcode-select --install)

Build and install

git clone https://github.com/LeeKyuSung/ttalkak.git
cd ttalkak
bash build.sh                    # all three
bash build.sh MicRecorder        # just one

for a in AudioFix ThemeToggle MicRecorder; do
  ditto "build/$a.app" "/Applications/$a.app" && open "/Applications/$a.app"
done

Installing into /Applications matters. macOS will not remember privacy permissions for bundles that live in places like /private/tmp.

Each app's right-click menu has a Launch at login toggle.

Signing

The build script picks up an Apple Development certificate automatically if you have one. Without it, it falls back to ad-hoc signing — in which case every source edit resets the app's privacy permissions, because an ad-hoc signature's identity is just the code hash. You will re-approve the microphone prompt a lot while hacking on it.

Use your own bundle identifier with:

BUNDLE_PREFIX=com.example bash build.sh

Uninstall

Quit the apps and delete them from /Applications. If you enabled AudioFix's passwordless option, also revert that — see docs/sudoers.md (Korean).

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Why killall and not launchctl

The obvious way to restart CoreAudio does not work when System Integrity Protection is enabled, which is the default:

sudo launchctl kickstart -kp system/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod
→ Could not kickstart service: 150: Operation not permitted while
  System Integrity Protection is engaged (150)

SIP blocks launchctl operations on system/ domain daemons entirely, even for root. Sending a signal as root is still allowed, and launchd brings coreaudiod straight back. So sudo killall coreaudiod is the path that actually works.

Because killall only sends a signal, exit code 0 does not mean the daemon restarted. AudioFix confirms it by checking that the PID actually changed, and says so honestly when it cannot confirm.

Passwordless restart (opt-in)

By default every click asks for an admin password. The right-click menu offers to install a sudoers rule so it does not — it is never installed automatically, since it waives sudo authentication.

The rule permits exactly one command, arguments included, so it cannot be used to kill anything else:

Cmnd_Alias AUDIOFIX_KILL = /usr/bin/killall coreaudiod
<your-username> ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: AUDIOFIX_KILL, AUDIOFIX_PROBE

You can read the exact script before running it:

/Applications/AudioFix.app/Contents/MacOS/AudioFix --print-installer

Editing sudoers badly can lock you out of sudo, so the installer backs up /etc/sudoers, validates the assembled configuration with visudo -cf (not just the fragment), and rolls back on any failure. It also records whether it was the one that added the @includedir line, so uninstalling never removes a line that was already there. Details in docs/sudoers.md (Korean).

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Recordings

• Saved to ~/Downloads
• Named 녹음_2026-08-14_101530.m4a, with a numeric suffix if a name collides
• AAC mono 64 kbps .m4a — feeds straight into Whisper-style transcription

Pick the input device from the right-click menu; the choice is remembered. The default is the built-in microphone on purpose: selecting a Bluetooth headset as the input forces the HFP profile, which degrades output audio to phone-call quality for as long as you are recording.

The recorder also:

• finalizes the file when the app quits or you log out, so it is never left unplayable
• keeps whatever was captured when the input device disappears mid-recording, and tells you why it stopped
• ignores a second click while a recording is still starting, so you never get two overlapping recordings

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Layout

ttalkak/
├── Shared/Shared.swift          process exec, admin exec, alerts, status icon, login item
├── AudioFix/AudioFix.swift
├── ThemeToggle/ThemeToggle.swift
├── MicRecorder/MicRecorder.swift
├── build.sh
└── docs/
    ├── macos-notes.md           macOS constraints hit while building this
    └── sudoers.md               privilege design and how to undo it

No dependencies, no Xcode project, no SwiftPM. Each app is one swiftc invocation over Shared.swift plus its own file.

The click behaviour lives in StatusIcon. The trick is keeping statusItem.menu empty at rest — if a menu stays attached, a left-click opens it and the action never fires, which defeats the whole point.

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Notes

docs/macos-notes.md is written in Korean and covers what actually cost time here: SIP blocking launchctl, status icons silently banished behind the notch, TCC refusing the microphone because of a missing entitlement rather than user choice, do shell script swallowing exit codes, pipe deadlock when draining stdout and stderr in sequence, and losing an entire recording by not letting the file finalize.

License

MIT — see LICENSE