About
One person, and the source to prove it
Isleta is made by Timothy Murphy. No company, no funding, no team, and nothing held back to sell you later. Normally you would have to take that on trust. Since September 2026 the whole app is on GitHub under the MIT License, so you do not.
- Maintainers
- 1
- No company, no funding, no roadmap sold in advance
- Releases
- 16
- Every one of them written up, and the notes are the same file the updater shows you
- Licence
- MIT
- Read it, build it, fork it, or take a piece for something of your own
- Languages
- 4
- Following whichever your Mac is set to, with no language setting of its own
Why it costs nothing
Two reasons, and neither is generosity.
- A licence check would be a second kind of network request. An app whose strongest claim is how little it says to the internet cannot then phone home to ask whether you have paid
- What Isleta does is small. It fills in a rectangle your Mac already has and gets out of the way — worth building carefully, not worth a subscription
There is no paid tier waiting in a branch, either. Nothing on the changelog was ever withheld from a free user, because there has never been another kind.
The risk, stated plainly
One maintainer is a real dependency, and no amount of prose makes it not one. What the licence does is put a floor under it: if this project stops, the code does not go with it.
- Build the last version yourself and keep it working
- Hand it to somebody else, or fork it and carry on
- None of which needs my permission, or needs me to still be here
That is why the source went public, rather than as a gesture towards openness. An app that lives at the top of your screen all day should not be something only one person can repair.
Open source
The whole app, not a README and a download link
It holds what actually ships — five Swift packages and a thin app shell, the notes for every release, and the documentation behind each awkward decision. The build you download is built from it.
Build it without an Apple account
Debug builds are ad-hoc signed and need no certificate. Clone it, run ./Tools/check.sh, open what comes out. No package manager to install, no code generation step.
One command is the whole check
It builds and tests every package, runs the localisation audit, builds the app, then audits the built app. It has to pass before anything is called done.
The documentation is the interesting part
Most of it was measured on real hardware, usually after an evening was lost to the thing it warns about. Each package records what it deliberately does not own.
Helping
What is genuinely useful
In roughly this order — the first is worth more than the last, which is not how these lists usually run.
- A bug you can reproduce
- A display arrangement that confuses it, a music app it does not recognise. Hardware quirks cannot be found from here.
- An argument about a design decision
- Discovery is still an open question. Ideas get argued about in the open, which is how the good ones survive.
- A patch
- The house rules and the performance budget are written down before you start, so the review is about code rather than taste.
- A security issue, quietly
- By mail rather than a public issue, so there is time to ship a fix before it is a map for anyone else.
Money is on that list too, and it is deliberately not on it first — there is a page for that, and nothing on it unlocks anything.
Elsewhere
A few other apps, built the same way by the same one person, at idevtim.com. This page is not going to sell you any of them.
Version 2.4.0 is the current build. macOS 26 or later, Apple silicon.