Sudo Play, a Free Mac Menu Bar App, Picks One Spotify Playlist a Day From Your Genre and Developer Mood, Like Friday Deploy or Debugging

The window shows your choice as a command: sudo play --genre jazz --mood flow-state. “That is only a joke for developers,” Arena writes, “because there is nothing to run in a terminal.”

The problem it solves is small and daily. “I code with music almost every day. And every day I lose time on the same small problem: I cannot find a good playlist for how I feel.” Spotify’s search, he says, isn’t “made for a developer on a Monday morning, or for someone who is about to deploy on a Friday afternoon.”

The moods are the joke and the menu. The README lists eight: Shipped It (“Something just went live”), Coffee Needed, Blue Monday, Flow State, Debugging (“Calm and patient, long investigation”), Friday Deploy (“Brave, energetic, a bit risky”), Agent Mode (“Calm, watching the machines work”) and Night Shift (“Wired, past midnight, one more commit”). Next cycles to another playlist and Surprise me picks both for you.

The daily pick is shared on purpose. “The pick is the same all day, and the same for everyone who chooses the same genre and mood,” the README says, “so if a playlist fits your afternoon, you can tell someone else how to find it.”

The day the window stopped answering

The app is built with Laravel and NativePHP, which packages PHP as a desktop app. On October 21, it broke in a way that’s hard to spot. “The window was open and the notifications still came, but every click did nothing,” Arena writes. “Inside the app, a PHP server shows the window, and that server had been killed from the outside. Nothing started it again, so the app looked alive when it was not.”

Version 1.0.3, released October 27, restarts that server “within a few seconds.” If it can’t, the window now says “Sudo Play stopped in the background. Press ⌘Q and open it again,” instead of showing a button that does nothing. Arena tested it “by killing the server many times,” then left a test build running overnight. The same release moves the bundled PHP from 8.4.21 to 8.4.27, which the release notes say fixes two critical PHP vulnerabilities.

The launch was quieter than the app. Arena put Sudo Play on Product Hunt October 26 and says “the first day was quiet.” What arrived instead were “several emails from people selling things, like paid upvotes. I ignored all of them. I want the votes, if they come, to come from people who tried the app.”

That’s the part most indie launches don’t write down. The app has one star on GitHub and a catalog that is, for now, mostly his own taste. “I cannot do it alone, and your taste is different from mine,” he writes. Whether a shared daily pick ever builds the little community it’s designed for depends on other developers adding their Night Shift playlists to that one file.