SimpleNotes is a notes scratchpad built for the macOS menu bar, using an external package to handle secure storage using the keychain.
The absolute core of this project shows how little code is takes to produce a menu bar app for macOS using SwiftUI’s MenuBarExtra API.
However, there are a handful of things to watch out for:
- The
@AppStorageproperty wrapper is great for storing the user’s preferred font size, but should not be used for storing the user’s text because it is not secure. Instead, we use the macOS keychain, which is securely encrypted. - When the user changes their notes text it starts a three-second task delay before saving their new note text, to avoid burning through CPU time as they type.
- Storing a date in
@AppStorageis not possible without adding an extension onDate. This rounds the date to an integer, storing the number of whole seconds that have elapsed since January 1st 2001, which is more than accurate enough for our purposes here. - Before writing anything to the macOS clipboard, it’s important to call
NSPasteboard.general.clearContents()first.
SimpleNotes was made by Paul Hudson as part of the Simple SwiftUI project. It’s available under the MIT license, which permits commercial use, modification, distribution, and private use.
This project uses the KeychainAccess library from Kishikawa Katsumi to handle secure storage of the user’s note text.