RAMble

Watch your Mac think.

Live on a real desktop: Murmuration in a full storm while Ollama pins the GPU. Watch the full one-minute demo (MP4).

RAMble is a free, native macOS overlay that turns your system's inner life — RAM pressure, CPU, GPU, swap, and your local LLMs — into living, glowing animations on your desktop. When Ollama streams tokens, you see a neural network firing. When memory pressure climbs, you see the machine strain. No graphs, no numbers — you just know, at a glance, like watching weather.

It sits behind your windows (or in front, your call), never catches a click, and idles light enough to leave on all day.

• Native — Swift + Metal, universal (Apple Silicon + Intel). No Electron, no browser, no ports.
• Private — reads public system counters and localhost only. Nothing leaves your machine, no analytics, no accounts.
• Open — MIT-spirited source, plugin SDK, ~zero dependencies.

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The animations

Synapse	A neural artery crosses your screen through a living canopy of dendrites, silver at rest — color exists only while the machine computes. Every token your model generates enters at the left as a comet-tailed pulse and crosses the whole trunk, shedding cascades at each hub. This is what "the model is thinking" looks like.
Rain	A storm on a receding ground plane. Drops land big and bright at the front, small and dim toward the horizon, each throwing a splash crown and ripple. Load drives the downpour, wind slants it, and lightning strikes as the gauges climb.
Filigree	A strange attractor as the shape of the machine's mind: one chaotic filament sculpture, deposited from thousands of faint points, that kneads itself faster the harder the system works. Tokens burn hot through the lace; loading a model re-forms it into a new sculpture.
Murmuration	Hundreds of silver birds wheel as one organism. RAM grows the flock, stress frays it into nervous scatter, and each generated token ignites a colored leader streaking through. Hit swap and a red predator appears and hunts the flock open.
Mycelium	A slime-mould colony forages your screen: thousands of blind agents grow living transport filaments, junction by junction. CPU speeds the foraging, stress starves the network thin, tokens feed it bursts of color, and loading a model re-seeds the organism.
Coral	Computation as accretion. A closed ring grows by insertion into ruffled, brain-fold reefs — the shape on screen is the fossil record of your machine's work. The growing edge glows young, sustained load blooms folds on folds, and a model load wipes the reef like a tide.
Fireworks	A night valley behind an invisible treeline. Calm gets one low lazy shell every little while; load raises the launch rate, the apex, and the burst size until sustained effort tips into a grand finale of stacked volleys. Every falling ember dies into the silhouette.

Rain — lightning cracks as the gauges climb	Fireworks — shells over the invisible treeline
Filigree — the machine's mind as a chaotic sculpture	Mycelium — living transport filaments, junction by junction
Murmuration — the flock frays as pressure climbs	Coral — the machine's work, accreted into folds

Every screenshot above is a real frame rendered by RAMble's own headless --snapshot mode — no compositing tricks, just the actual HDR pipeline.

Every scene reacts to sudden change, not just steady load. A compute spike — a build kicking off, a model loading — lands as an event the moment it happens: Rain cracks lightning and slams a gust, Synapse detonates hubs, Murmuration startles like a gunshot in the valley, Fireworks answers with an instant volley.

This release is a major animation design overhaul, thanks to Atelier — a design-skill package for Claude Code (philosophy-first direction, verified generative systems, and a critique loop that scores real renders). Every scene was rebuilt or newly designed through it: Synapse from the ground up, and Filigree, Murmuration, Mycelium, Coral, and Fireworks born from its generative-motion systems. Each scene's design philosophy lives in docs/.

Seven themes (Glass, Cyberpunk, Minimal, Synthwave, Terminal, Dark, Light) restyle everything, and an Intensity slider runs the whole show from slow-drip-zen to full chaos.

What it watches

• Memory — used / free / cached / wired / compressed, real memory pressure, and swap (usage, growth, page-ins/outs)
• CPU — total, per-core, efficiency vs performance cores
• GPU — utilization via IOKit
• Disk — read/write throughput
• Local AI — Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM, Open WebUI, and any process you add: model loads/unloads, context length, and generation activity (model load = burst; tokens = firing; finish = ripple)

Honesty note: local LLM servers don't expose live token counters, so tokens/sec is an intensity estimate derived from accelerator activity — perfect for driving visuals, not for benchmarking.

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Install

Option 1 — Download (easiest)

1. Grab RAMble.app.zip from the latest release.

2. Unzip it and drag RAMble.app into your Applications folder.

3. Run this one command in Terminal — you almost certainly need it:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/RAMble.app

4. Now open RAMble normally. A welcome window confirms it's running.

Why step 3? RAMble is open-source and signed ad-hoc rather than with a $99/yr Apple Developer ID, so it isn't notarized. macOS quarantines anything downloaded from the internet, and for un-notarized apps Sequoia often reports "RAMble is damaged and can't be opened" — which is misleading; nothing is damaged. The command above just removes the quarantine flag. Right-click → Open no longer reliably bypasses this on macOS 15+, so use the command. Building from source (Option 2) avoids the issue entirely, since locally built apps are never quarantined.

After launch, look for the ram-head icon in your menu bar — RAMble has no Dock icon and no window, so that icon is the whole interface. Reopen the guide any time from menu bar → Welcome / Help.

Runs on Apple Silicon and Intel (universal binary), macOS 15+.

Option 2 — Build from source (5 minutes, no Xcode needed)

Requirements: macOS 15+ (Apple Silicon or Intel) and the Swift toolchain from Apple's Command Line Tools.

# 1. Get the toolchain (skip if you already have git/swift):
xcode-select --install
# 2. Clone and build:
git clone https://github.com/jangles-byte/RAMble.git
cd RAMble
./scripts/make-app.sh
# 3. Install and launch:
cp -R build/RAMble.app /Applications/
open /Applications/RAMble.app

Want to try it without installing? swift run -c release runs it in place.

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Using RAMble

Everything lives under the ram-head menu bar icon (top-right of your screen):

• Show Overlay — toggle the animation on/off
• Animation — switch between Synapse, Rain, Filigree, Murmuration, Mycelium, Coral, Fireworks
• Welcome / Help — reopen the first-run guide
• Settings… — the good stuff (below)
• Check for Updates… — one-click update to the latest release
• Quit RAMble

The overlay draws behind your windows, on the desktop itself — hide or move a window (or press F11) to see it. It's fully click-through: it can never steal a click, a keystroke, or focus.

Settings tour

Appearance

• Bring to front — float the animation over all your windows instead (still click-through). Pair with the opacity slider to keep working through it.
• Charts only — hide the animation entirely but keep the desktop meters: RAMble as a pure glanceable dashboard. The Metal view pauses completely, so this mode costs almost nothing.
• Intensity — tortoise-to-hare slider. Left: sparse and calm even under load. Right: busy screen even at idle. System load layers on top either way. (Lower intensity also means less CPU spent.)
• Opacity / Scale — how visible, how big. Scale shrinks the scene from the center; physics objects can tumble out of a shrunken scene and bounce along your real screen edges before fading away.
• Resolution — internal render resolution, 100% down to an extreme 5%. GPU cost scales with pixel count, so 25% renders ~6% of the pixels; below 50% the upscaling switches to crisp nearest-neighbor and the whole thing goes deliberately retro — "Pixel mode." Pair with the 30 FPS limit for a near-free overlay on battery.
• Animation / Theme / Frame rate — pick your look; 30 FPS roughly halves RAMble's cost vs 60.

Displays — choose which monitors show the overlay.

Monitoring

• Desktop meters — a compact, draggable panel of live gauges (RAM, pressure, swap, CPU, GPU, disk, stress, tokens/sec). Click and hold to drag it anywhere; it can't be lost off-screen; picking a corner resets it.
• Meters style — Bars (classic labeled meters) or Engine Room: a living cutaway of the machine — RAM fills a glass reservoir (wired bedrock, compressed sediment, liquid that rises), overflow drips into a red swap sump, one piston pumps per CPU core, the GPU turbine spins and throws cyan token sparks while a model streams — and as stress climbs, a press descends and visibly crushes the whole room. Click any part for its detail window, same as the bars.
• Watched processes — add your own process names (comma-separated) to the AI watch list.
• Live state — the raw numbers, if you want to peek behind the curtain.

General — start at login, hide/show Dock icon, version + Check for Updates button.

See it react (the fun part)

# If you use Ollama:
ollama run llama3.2 "write me a limerick about RAM"

Watch Synapse light up while tokens stream — bursts on model load, cascade storms during generation, a ripple when it finishes. No LLM handy? Open a few heavy apps or build some code and watch the stress climb.

Updating

Menu bar icon → Check for Updates… → click Update to X. RAMble downloads the new version, swaps itself, and relaunches. Done.

Uninstall

Quit RAMble from the menu bar, then drag /Applications/RAMble.app to the Trash. There are no background helpers; settings live in standard macOS preferences and weigh a few KB.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Fix
"I opened it and nothing happened"	That's almost the point — check the menu bar for the ram icon, then hide a window to see the desktop.
Can't see the animation	Menu bar icon → make sure Show Overlay is checked; Settings → Displays → your monitor is enabled; try Bring to front to rule out wallpaper utilities that cover the desktop layer.
"RAMble is damaged and can't be opened"	Nothing is damaged — it's the quarantine flag on an un-notarized app. Run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/RAMble.app and open it again.
Double-clicked it and nothing happened	RAMble has no Dock icon or window by design. Check the menu bar for the ram icon. If your menu bar is full (or hidden by a notch), quit some menu-bar apps or use a manager like Bartender. First launch also shows a welcome window.
Won't launch on an older Mac	RAMble needs macOS 15+. The binary is universal (Apple Silicon + Intel), but Sequoia is the floor.
Feels heavy	Settings → Appearance: drop Frame rate to 30, pull Resolution down (below 50% goes pleasantly retro), and/or pull Intensity left. Debug builds are slow — always use the release build.
LLM activity not detected	RAMble polls Ollama on :11434 and OpenAI-compatible servers on :1234/:8080/:8000. Custom setup? Add your server's process name under Settings → Monitoring.
Meters panel vanished	Settings → Monitoring → pick any corner — that resets its position.

Performance

Release builds render up to ~32k particles through a single instanced Metal draw with trail and bloom post-passes. Monitoring samples at 1 Hz (system) and 2.5 Hz (processes + LLM HTTP), so the watcher itself is near-free. Your levers: FPS limit, Intensity, and animation choice. At 30 FPS + low intensity, RAMble fades into single-digit-idle territory; at 120 FPS + maximum chaos, it's a light show and priced accordingly.

For developers

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md — monitors → unified SystemState → stress engine → Metal renderer → plugins.
• docs/PLUGIN_SDK.md — write your own animation in ~60 lines; see Examples/PulseRingPlugin.swift.
• Contributing a scene? We strongly recommend designing it with Atelier, the design-skill package every current scene was built with: write the philosophy first (see the docs/*-design.md files for the format), pick a verified generative system, then render real frames with --snapshot and critique them before opening a PR. Scenes that ship with a philosophy doc and before/after renders get reviewed fastest.
• docs/BUILDING.md — targets, tests, packaging.
• Verify any change with swift run RAMbleSelfTest (60+ checks, no Xcode required).

Community scenes

The scene marketplace is GitHub itself — free, no accounts beyond GitHub, no domain:

• Browse scenes: every community scene lives under the ramble-scene topic. Tag your repo with ramble-scene and it appears there automatically.
• Share a scene: publish a repo containing your plugin's .swift file, its design philosophy (docs/*-design.md format), and a --snapshot render or two. Then show it off in Discussions → Show and tell.
• Install a scene: drop the .swift file into Sources/RAMbleKit/Plugins/, add one register line in PluginRegistry (docs/PLUGIN_SDK.md walks through it), and run ./scripts/make-app.sh.
• Get it built in: the best community scenes can be PR'd into RAMble itself — philosophy doc and renders required, Atelier strongly recommended (see above).
• No Mac? You can still contribute. CI builds every push and PR on a free macOS runner, runs the self-test, and renders every registered scene (including yours) to PNGs — download the scene-renders artifact from the Actions run, look, and iterate. Slower than local, but it's a real feedback loop from any OS.

Built with Swift 6, SwiftUI, Metal, and Combine. PRs welcome.