A friend recently had the fun idea to write a small script for his machine running Arch displaying his current battery state as a series of hearts instead of the traditional boring percentage. He did so via a short python script and the magic of Font Awesome to integrate with Conky.
I have to admit that writing a quick script in your language of choice makes customization like this a lot easier than on OS X, but I liked the idea and wanted to follow along with something native as well. So today I wrote a little app in Swift titled HeartBattery.
It doesn’t really do a whole lot besides pulling the state of your battery every five minutes and telling you a few things about it. The hardest part was actually getting the data and generating the image. Getting the data unfortunately isn’t as easy as reading it from a file somewhere like others systems do it, but you have to interface with some rather confusing C APIs. Not really wanting to do that I eventually stumbled across SystemKit, a Swift lib that abstracts all that away and offers an API that couldn’t be much simpler. It’s from the same person behind dshb, that amazingly pretty ncurses powered system monitor for OS X.
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem possible to set a custom font for a status item and multiple images are also not an option (afaik), so I had to resort to compositing a few icons together on every refresh of the app to generate a single wide image for the menubar representing the current battery state. Really doesn’t feel like the cleanest option, but another thing learned can’t be bad either I guess.
If you want to have a look you can find the source and download link on the GitHub repo here. And as usual, if you have any ideas, suggestions or think my code can be improved upon and want to tell me how to pull it off, why not head straight for the issue/pull request 😊
Now all that’s missing is a bling sound whenever you lose a heart 😄