Aspen is a free, open collection of tools which hopes to improve your macOS experience in one way or another.
In 2022, I bought my first macOS product, the M1 iMac. Prior to this, I had many short experiences with the Intel iMac's and I was not impressed until the overhaul with Apple Silicon. Well, this basically indoctrinated me into the Apple ecosystem, now I almost have one of each product line, consequentially allowing me to study macOS greater in-depth; my increasing reliance on the entire iCloud suite for example.
As I studied macOS more, a realisation hit me, macOS is like a template almost, even some of the apps are (like the Health app and Fitness), so many helpful, useful features are missing while the API's and such are there. I then began looking for apps to fill in these many voids but, suprise to me, A LOT of them were behind subscriptions or pretty steep paywalls, mostly of which for extremely basic functionality, seeming as if it is all fragmented to sate some extreme greed and abusing the fact that many macOS users are not tech-savvy or aware of this.
So, this is where my need came into play, for a unified yet entirely modular app that provides as much granularity as possible while remaining simple for the... Not so tech savy...
- Aspen will ALWAYS be free and completely open-source.
- Aspen will NEVER collect any data at all, even 'anonymous' data.
- Aspen will ALWAYS be optimised for energy effeciency aka, as much performance per watt as possible.
- Aspen will NEVER be intrusive, like spamming you with notifications or popups, or requesting excessive amounts of permissions until they are absolutely needed for a feature to work, to name some examples.
- Aspen will ALWAYS be open to new ideas and suggestions.
- Aspen will NEVER host ads or anything like it.
- Aspen will ALWAYS be as lightweight as possible when it comes to CPU usage, RAM usage and storage (In focus order, RAM and storage will be prioritised less than CPU cycles).
- ONLY support macOS versions supported by Apple (The 'v1' release will only support the latest macOS onward)
- ONLY Swift and Rust can be used.
- ONLY use the latest version of Swift and Rust when building for a public build unless there is good reason not to do so.
- ONLY use 3rd party code/projects/packages when necessary. Foe example, swift-bridge, or something like libavif or say, Swift didnt have native JSON handling so, we may need a package/library.
