Hacker News: kushalpandya

New comment by kushalpandya in "EFF is leaving X"

kushalpandya — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:01:11 +0000

That too would very likely be seen as deeply political.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Ghost Pepper – Local hold-to-talk speech-to-text for macOS"

kushalpandya — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:48:04 +0000

Speecg-to-text is basically AI version of Todo app that we used to build every week when new frontend framework would release.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Detecting file changes on macOS with kqueue"

kushalpandya — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 04:03:41 +0000

This looks interesting and I might give it a try. I did look at FSEvents in the past but due to my needs in macOS app, I took a very niche (and not so fast) approach of running find | ls -lT | shasum spawned in a separate process to reliably tell if a folder has changed.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

kushalpandya — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:41:56 +0000

Been working on Petrichor - native macOS music player [1]

This has been my side project for nearly a year, and I also shared it here in HN when it was in alpha [2] and received a ton of feedback (and stars on GitHub).

The project has evolved quite a bit since then, like having additional file format support, lyrics, Last.fm scrobbling, and more!

[1] https://github.com/kushalpandya/Petrichor

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515266

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:50:42 +0000

Yes, the app got enough traction already to warrant for Homebrew and MacPorts distribution, so I'll try to incorporate both!

Audiobooks support looks like a neat idea, I'll see if I can accommodate it in future, for now, I'm keeping it limited to music files only.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:48:23 +0000

Smart playlists will be coming soon as I've done all the infra work to support it, in fact current default playlists that app has (Favourites, Top 25 Most Played, Top 25 Recently Played) use smart playlists behind the scenes, just that I don't have a UI to edit the rules yet.

Search should already be very fast (and filter through matches across any metadata field) as the app uses FTS5 on SQLite db to search tracks. But let me know if you still notice performance issues or bugs around it.

There might be iOS app in future but no plans for Windows app as that's a separate project of its own.

For cloud storage syncing, I did consider it at one point but then scope of this app would be very large, and there are plenty good apps to sync cloud storage data, like I personally use https://maestral.app/ for syncing Dropbox.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 14:33:16 +0000

No plans for iOS app in near future but once this one reaches a feature stability, I'll think about it, as the decision to use Swift & Swift UI was for sharing logic with iOS app in future.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 12:54:19 +0000

Winamp is OG, so why not both!

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 12:53:29 +0000

Right-click and select open as the app is currently signed using ad-hoc signing as Apple notarization costs money. :(

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 12:51:36 +0000

I started with only macOS 15 for starters, but I agree it might be possible to support even older versions so I'll check if this can be improved in future alpha or beta builds.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 12:20:52 +0000

No there's no limit on number of songs but there's a bug where if any track's metadata violates db constraints, scanning doesn't go past it. I've fixed it already and will include the fix in next alpha. I also need to get that auto-updates sorted now that folks are actually using it! :D

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 03:16:34 +0000

Yes, iPhone is target once mac stable release is complete as the core logic can be shared between 2 platforms.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 01:12:37 +0000

There you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor

> Petrichor is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS"

kushalpandya — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:48:21 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, I'll add it to Readme, although app lists supported formats (as supported by AVFoundation) on app UI where user can add folders.

Show HN: Petrichor – a free, open-source, offline music player for macOS

kushalpandya — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 22:17:31 +0000

I have a large collection of music files gathered over the years, so I was sorely missing a decent offline music player that can serve as a frontend for the collection. I tried several Mac apps over the years, but since streaming music is mainstream now, there aren't good offline music players that meet my needs. So I spent the last 3 months building Petrichor! The idea is to solve my problem and learn Swift UI development along the way, while giving back to the community with this open-source project! Here's a list of features it has, with more getting added in future;

- Everything you'd expect from an offline music player!

- Map your music folders and browse your library in an organised view.

- Create playlists and manage the play queue interactively.

- Browse music using folder view when needed.

- Pin anything (almost!) to the sidebar for quick access to your favourite music.

- Navigate easily: right-click a track to go to its album, artist, year, etc.

- Native macOS integration with menubar and dock playback controls, plus dark mode support.

- Search quickly through large libraries containing thousands of songs.

The app is still in alpha, so things may look unpolished, but I've been testing the alpha builds for the past few weeks and fixing issues as I find them for v1 release. I welcome any feedback (and contributions!) on GitHub repo. Please give it a try and let me know what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44515266

Points: 202

# Comments: 106

New comment by kushalpandya in "There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11"

kushalpandya — Sat, 19 Jun 2021 06:16:31 +0000

You haven't used KDE Plasma as primary desktop for long time, have you?

New comment by kushalpandya in "There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11"

kushalpandya — Fri, 18 Jun 2021 18:59:54 +0000

In my years of using different operating systems, KDE Plasma has had the most consistent UI across the board.

New comment by kushalpandya in "India’s second wave of Covid-19 feels nothing like its first"

kushalpandya — Sat, 01 May 2021 06:10:31 +0000

Sure now, but Maharashtra has been overflowing since early March when other states where there were no gatherings, didn't have cases. Point is, not single govt alone has failed. Pretty much everyone failed, including citizens like us who forgot precautions in January and February when cases dropped considerably.

I still see public ignoring safety norms like nothing has happened.

As for people running for hospitals, a primary reason (as per a doctor who treated my dad for Covid) is that people are ignoring symptoms for days (over a week at times) after which virus does enough damage that only option they're left with is getting oxygen assistance.

New comment by kushalpandya in "India’s second wave of Covid-19 feels nothing like its first"

kushalpandya — Sat, 01 May 2021 05:55:18 +0000

Yeah right, Maharashtra had massive gathering for Kumbh Mela at Bandra-Worli Sea Link, and Delhi had election rally for Assembly elections and newly appointed CM Arvind Kejriwal had merely days to manage mess left by LG.

New comment by kushalpandya in "Pixel 5"

kushalpandya — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 19:36:28 +0000

Pixel 5 is everything Pixel 4 should've been, this is essentially a last year's phone with processor that's also as fast as last year's flagship processor. And none of it is bad in any way, $699 of asking price is appropriate.

What's sad is that Pixel phones even after 5 generations have had at least one tragic flaw which would be a deal breaker for many;

- Pixel 1 - Giant bezels

- Pixel 2 - OLED burn-in and color issues

- Pixel 3 - Gigantic notch

- Pixel 4 - Radar which still isn't proven to be useful, no ultrawide camera.

This is first time that Google made a flagship phone (3a and 4a are still midrange) that doesn't have any obvious flaws, so I hope it changes fate of Pixel line for good.