Posted By Neale Van Fleet on May 7th, 2026

Late last year, we unveiled SoundSource 6, the latest and greatest version of our essential audio control utility. This upgrade added substantial new functionality, without drastically overhauling the nimble interface that was already familiar to countless users.

Today, I want to talk about a few of the design puzzles we had to solve while developing SoundSource 6.

Initial Design Inspirations

We advertise SoundSource as “sound control so good, it ought to be built in to MacOS”, and we want it to feel like part of the system. That led us to take some cues from the system-level control centre as it existed when we began work on SoundSource 6. This is the control centre from MacOS 15 (Sequoia):

The visual blocks and sections seen here inspired our own layout. At one point, we even played around with using similar chunky sliders. Here’s how an early mockup of that looked in SoundSource:

That was initially appealing, as the overlapping volume icon in the slider saved several dozen pixels, particularly helpful for our small interface. However, we soon noted an issue with these combined chubby sliders. We use the volume icon itself as a mute toggle. If the level is low, how can we tell if the user is trying to grab the slider knob or click the mute button?

Though we found ways to make it work, we didn’t like the possible confusion it could cause, and ultimately moved away from this idea. We weren’t too surprised when Apple themselves ditched this approach in the control centre in MacOS 26 (Tahoe). Some other changes they made in Tahoe were quite surprising indeed, however.

Enter Liquid Glass

During WWDC 2025, with SoundSource 6’s beta period already in full swing, Apple unveiled their new “Liquid Glass” design language. Where the Sequoia control centre had provided inspiration, the Tahoe control center offered only eye strain:

In addition to losing those overlapping icons and chunky tracks, sliders in the control centre also lost their knobs for some reason, at least until you hover over them. And as you can see, Tahoe’s control centre is both less compact and less legible than the previous version, but at least it’s also ugly.¹ When we saw this change, we quickly determined that SoundSource would not be following in its footsteps.

We work hard to make sure our products look and feel right on the Mac, but we’ve never been afraid to ignore Apple’s lesser design whims.² We want our apps to exist harmoniously alongside Apple’s designs, but they don’t need to match exactly. Notably, the actual glass part of Liquid Glass is something we’re mostly steering clear of in our own designs.

Breaking Our Icon Out of Jail

Liquid Glass wasn’t the only change to be seen in Tahoe. Apple also messed with app icons, necessitating an update to SoundSource’s icon:

This modification was minor, but it was also rather frustrating, as it came due to Apple’s oppressive design approach. To explain, a little background is needed.

Starting with MacOS 11 (Big Sur) in 2020, Apple decided to make all their Mac app icons into squircle tile shapes, matching the look of apps on the iPhone.

Apple encouraged developers to follow in their squircley footsteps. Though having all icons use the same shape makes it more difficult to tell them apart, we did our best to roll with this change, while still retaining a bit of individuality. Some of our icons fit the general squircle shape, but had elements which subtly broke the frame. We stuck with those accents, as they made icons easier to pick out, and gave them a bit more character.

In the image above, the pink area shows Apple’s desired shape. The wand in SoundSource 5’s icon and the mic in Audio Hijack’s old icon broke out of that frame slightly.³

For several years, these icons worked just fine. They fit in with the general aesthetic Apple sought, while maintaining some personality. Regrettably, with Tahoe, Apple decided to enforce their exact desired squircle shape on every single app. If an icon deviated, it was aggressively cropped down and imprisoned on an ugly grey background.

Given Apple’s heavy-handedness, we felt forced to make a change. Though SoundSource’s icon doesn’t show up in the dock, it does show up elsewhere in the Finder, and the grey icon jail makes it smaller and more difficult to pick out. Updating SoundSource’s icon was fortunately pretty minor, with the magic wand just moving into the centre of the icon. Still, it was a change wrought by Apple that we did not relish making.

Concentricity

By contrast, one aspect of Tahoe’s updated design that I’ve been delighted by is concentricity. That’s a jargony way of say that rounded elements in an interface are drawn as if their circular elements share a centre.

To see this in action, look at the following example from SoundSource’s “Quick Configs” menu. Notice how the semi-circle of the selector and the quarter-circle of the app window, if drawn out, would share the same centre:

The visual effect of these concentric circles is just nice. Much as music notes in a chord elevate each other and are pleasing to the ear, concentricity is satisfying to my eye. Tahoe’s focus on it is a refreshing aspect of Apple’s new design. For this particular designer, it shines like a good deed in a weary world, and it’s an element of the new design I was very happy to embrace.

Keeping an Agile App Posture

Beyond dealing with changes Apple made to the MacOS, we also had to solve the challenge of adding substantial new power to SoundSource while still keeping its interface fast and compact. This was no mean feat.

When considering the overall design of an app, it’s often helpful to think about what I call its “posture”, its size and how it carries itself on your system. For example, a big, complex app like Photoshop takes over your whole screen, providing a deep work environment unto itself. SoundSource is almost the polar opposite, a small and streamlined app that mostly runs in the background. It’s something you’ll dip into briefly to tweak a few settings, and then get back to what you were doing.

In SoundSource’s earliest versions, it was positively tiny. Here’s a screenshot from our archives, which shows the entirety of the interface for the first version:

The barebones nature of the original SoundSource made an unobtrusive posture come naturally. Maintaining that lightness in the feature-rich modern SoundSource is much more difficult. In contrast with the above, here’s SoundSource 6’s main window:

Even if you’ve never used any version of SoundSource, it’s obvious from these two screenshots that the app does a lot more for you these days. The recent upgrade to SoundSource 6 added many new features, including audio device configuration options, AirPlay support, and customizable output groups. It took a great deal of thinking, and many mockups and iterations, to fit all that new functionality into our compact menu bar app.

Controlling Audio Devices

One notable example of this iteration was just how we provide the aforementioned audio device configuration options. These are things like adjusting volume, balance, and sample rate for any and all audio devices you have plugged in to your Mac. My first instinct was to add a new “Devices” tab into the app’s “Settings” window. Here’s an early sketch:

While this made some sense in terms of navigation, it shoehorned way too much into a very small space. As we continued to add options to this area, it became less and less workable. Eventually, it was clear that these settings deserved their own window. Thus, the “Audio Devices” window was born:

Moving these controls to a distinct window provided the new features with a solid home, and leaves us room to add more in the future as well. We ultimately added several secondary windows in SoundSource 6. They’re easy to access from the main window, while avoiding making the app feel cluttered. Even with all of its new features, SoundSource is able to maintain its overall lightweight posture.

Wrapping Up

Those were just some of the design challenges that arose during the development of SoundSource 6. Figuring out solutions to them produced the app you see today. While SoundSource’s visible surface area remains small, it’s become a surprisingly deep application when it comes to functionality. The app is part ninja and part knight on horseback, part bicycle and part big rig. I’m proud that we’ve been able to wrap up so much power into such a nimble interface.

When I find myself at a Mac that doesn’t have SoundSource installed, it genuinely feels like something is missing. If you’re already a SoundSource user but haven’t tried version 6, check out the “What’s New” page and download the new version. And if you’re new to SoundSource, head over to its product page to learn more, and download the free trial.

Footnotes:

1. It’s outside the scope of this design breakdown, but I attribute much of the poor design in Liquid Glass to Apple over-centralizing. Beyond the immediate negative feelings toward blurry glass on the Mac, I really don’t like seeing identical visual styles everywhere, from the Mac to the iPhone and beyond. Different platforms have different needs, and require distinct solutions. Too much uniformity can definitely be a bad thing. ↩︎

2. Though Rogue Amoeba has been around since 2002, you won’t find any brushed metal in our past, to cite just one example. ↩︎

3. Worth noting, on MacOS 11 – MacOS 15, many of Apple’s icons included their own framebreakers. These included Preview’s loupe, Automator’s inanimate carbon rod, and Chess’s knight. ↩︎

Posted By Paul Kafasis on April 28th, 2026

Like hundreds of other Mac apps, our products use the open source Sparkle update framework to alert you to the existence of new versions. With the help of Sparkle, you can move to new versions of our apps in just a few clicks.

Though Sparkle serves us very well, it has one notable downside. Update announcements are most likely to appear at the least convenient time: right after you’ve launched the app. You want to start recording with Audio Hijack, for instance, but the app is telling you about a new version.

We’ve long wished to avoid these disruptions. With that in mind, we’re making changes to how update notifications appear throughout our apps. In the future, when the software’s timed automated check detects a newer version, it will no longer pop an obtrusive window like the one seen above.

Instead, a small “Update Available” indicator will be shown in the app’s interface. You can see it right here in Audio Hijack:

This change will provide you with more control over updating. Whenever you’re ready to update, you can click the indicator to be guided through the same speedy process as before. But if you need to get down to business, just ignore the indicator while you accomplish the desired task.¹

These new update indicators have already been added to Audio Hijack and Loopback, and we’ll be bringing them to additional apps in the future. The absence of a disruptive dialog is likely to go largely unnoticed, but it’s a quality-of-life improvement we’re very glad to make.

Footnotes:

1. This indicator is designed to be quite subtle, but we’re mindful that you might wish to hide it entirely. To do so, click the indicator, then select “Skip for Now”. This will hide the visual until the next timed check in a few days. ↩︎

Posted By Paul Kafasis on April 24th, 2026

Way back in 2009, we welcomed Lee Falin to the Rogue Amoeba team. In 2014, we celebrated his fifth anniversary with the company. Now, in 2026, it’s time to celebrate his tenth anniversary. What?

A Temporal Anomaly

Lee’s employment history at Rogue Amoeba could best be described as complicated. He’s done full-time work, part-time work, and contract work. There have been multiple opportunities that pulled him away completely, only for him to find his way back.

When Lee last rejoined the company in 2023, we hoped to incentivize him to stick around longer. We thus told him that if he made it to 2026, we’d mark his 10 year anniversary with the company, some 17 years after he was first hired. Hey, who’s going to stop us?

Lee’s Work

Lee initially handled Rogue Amoeba’s support needs, and like every member of our top-notch support team, he was great at helping customers directly with our products. After a little over a year, however, he switched to a programming role. In that role, he’s been able to have a big impact, in a wide variety of ways. In fact, he’s worked on MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and our web server. That’s quite the range!

For several years, Lee served as a product lead on the now-retired Airfoil for Windows. On the Mac, he’s also done extensive work on both Airfoil for Mac and our audio editor Fission.

When not focusing on a specific product, Lee has also worked on key components used across apps. To name just one example, the centralized Permissions window he built is found in each of our products, and it’s consistently been lauded by users. When people express appreciation for a Permissions window, you must be doing something right.

Lee has also done a substantial amount of server-side work. If you’ve ever purchased a product in our store, or used our support form, you’ve silently triggered a whole lot of backend systems created by Lee. More visible is our Customer Dashboard, a full-fledged web app he built.

Lee has always been a pleasure to work with, and he’s always improving. Of note, he’s gained the ability to accommodate changing requirements. We work hard to plan ahead, but the full scope of a problem isn’t always clear up front. Lee’s become quite good at iterating so we can get where we need to, and I now view it as a particular strength. In tandem with that, he’s always had a finely tuned sense for quality, and doesn’t stop until he’s met it.

Closing

Lee has been a terrific part of our team for a decade and then some. Seventeen years after Lee was first hired, I’m delighted to be able to celebrate this quirky “ten year” anniversary. Will we celebrate his fifteen year anniversary in a more normal timeframe? I certainly hope so. Check back in 2031.

Posted By Paul Kafasis on February 24th, 2026

A recent blog post from Marcin Wichary briefly discussed a proposed application interaction Mario Guzmán had posted on Mastodon. The aim was to help locate a window on screen:

As you can see in the demo above, clicking on the app’s Dock icon causes its main window to do a horizontal shake. While this is effective in drawing attention, as Wichary notes, this left-right shake already has a well-established meaning. Throughout MacOS, such a shake is used to indicate a password has not been accepted.

We actually tackled this exact problem several years back in SoundSource. The app’s main window can be pinned to remain open on screen. When it is, we wanted a click of the menu bar icon to draw attention to that already-open main window. We began with a left-right shake, much like what you see above.

Eventually, though, I realized it just didn’t feel right to me. The connection to both bad passwords and saying “No” was too strong. So I opened a case in our issue tracker titled “Consider modifying the ‘Here I Am’ shake”, and suggested that perhaps an up-down “yes” shake might work instead.

Nathan, our lead developer on SoundSource, experimented a bit. He eventually got us to the fantastic “pop” animation you can see here:

We released this change back at the end of 2021¹, and it can still be seen in SoundSource today. I recently noticed that Apple’s apps do a similar animation when opening an already-open file.² I remain delighted with this simple but effective pop animation. It feels like something other apps might adopt it as well.

Footnotes:

1. The release note for this read: “…now does a more logical ‘Here I am!’ pop to indicate its location.”↩︎

2. To see this, open an already-open file in almost any Apple app, including Pages, QuickTime Player, or TextEdit. The window for the file will quickly pop once. Though it’s not bad, I feel our double-pop is superior.↩︎

Posted By Neale Van Fleet on February 17th, 2026

During a recent update to our site’s footer, we fell backwards into a fun little easter egg. It’s easy to miss, so I thought I’d draw a little attention to it here.

When I finished mocking up the site’s new footer, the rightmost column just happened to be shorter than the others, leaving an empty space and making the design look a little off balance. To fill the space, I added an existing drawing of our mascot Ammo. This was intended as a placeholder, but it turned out that everyone liked Ammo there. He made it through the design process to go live on the site.

That wasn’t the end of the story, however, as we were soon led on a fun little diversion by an offhand comment: “He should be dressed up for holidays”. Almost as soon as the words were spoken, a bit of PHP code was implemented to automate swapping images, and I found myself drawing a couple dozen variations of Ammo for a wide variety of calendar events.

One of my favorites is the Saint Patrick’s Day Ammo. My first draft had our mascot dressed as a leprechaun. I was quite satisfied with the drawing, which was relatively detailed for something so small. But after finishing it, I was struck by some inspiration. Just like the Chicago river being dyed green, I realized that as an amoeba, the mostly-water based Ammo could also go green. I threw out my more detailed drawing in favour of a quick colour shift, making an emerald Ammo for St. Patty’s day.

I’ve included a few of the special Ammos in this post, but there are many more for you to spot on various holidays and cultural events. As I post this, the gold medal-winning Olympics Ammo is visible in the footer. Watch our footer over the course of time to see more.