Apidae is a small menu bar app that covers every screen on my Mac with a dark overlay and quietly watches for anyone bumping the keyboard while it is meant to be left alone. I built it because the more AI has moved into my daily work, especially through tools like Cowork, the more I wanted my Mac to just keep going: builds finishing, downloads landing, agents working, without me hovering nearby or the machine drifting off to sleep.
How it started
It began with a question about somebody else’s app, not a plan of my own. Back in May 2026 I came across Lockpaw, an MIT licensed Mac utility by Erik Nielsen that covers the screen and blocks input so a Mac can carry on working unattended. Because it’s MIT licensed, forking and modifying it was fair game, provided Erik’s original copyright stayed intact. The name, the mascot and the marketing site weren’t part of that licence though, so anything I put out publicly would need its own identity from the start.
The plan from day one was to use it myself first and worry about a wider release later. My own reason for wanting it was simple. As AI agents and tools like Cowork became part of how I actually work, I wanted my Mac to keep going without falling asleep or needing constant babysitting. As I put it to myself at the time, “the more and more AI becomes popular, especially like with cowork, I want to be able to keep the mac working easily, without it going to sleep.” That’s the whole seed of the project: a personal itch about keeping a Mac alive while agents get on with things, solved by starting from a well built open source app and making it properly mine.
Finding a name
I wanted the identity to lean on a bee or hive theme, something that works and keeps working. I generated a shortlist of about ten candidate names and checked each against domain and app name availability. Two stood out, Forage and Apidae, and Apidae won. It’s the taxonomic family that includes honeybees, so it carries the bee and hive idea without spelling it out.
From there came the practical bits: the domain getapidae.com, with apidae.app also secured, the bundle id app.getapidae.mac, and a private GitHub repository rather than a visible fork of Lockpaw. I set all of that up myself, working through GitHub Desktop, Homebrew, Xcode and XcodeGen, most of which was new to me at the time. The build tooling and the repo cleanup, renaming every folder and file away from any trace of Lockpaw, was done alongside Claude Code, with me approving each step as it went.
Building it
Apidae is Swift and SwiftUI, targeting macOS 14 and newer, with XcodeGen managing the Xcode project. The core mechanics carried over from Lockpaw’s own approach: a full screen overlay sitting at the system’s shielding window level, input blocking, and sleep prevention, plus the accessibility and input monitoring permissions macOS requires for that kind of thing. I worked through the build with a mix of Claude in a browser chat for planning and design decisions, and Claude Code for the actual implementation, pasting its numbered decision menus back and forth as the app took shape.
Giving it its own look
I wanted the brand to feel premium and minimal, taking a cue from how polished Lockpaw’s own branding felt while making Apidae clearly its own thing. That settled on a whole bee, abstracted, as the icon subject, in a strict two colour palette of pure black and a warm honey yellow, deliberately the plainest option on the table rather than a fuller colour scheme.
Getting there took a few rounds. Early icon attempts got reworked into a proper generation prompt so the design could be reproduced consistently: first for the main app icon, then for a smaller menu bar version that echoes the same shape as an outline rather than a solid silhouette, and finally for a standalone mascot pulled from the same artwork. The app icon also became the image shown on the lock overlay itself, echoing what Lockpaw does on its own lock screen. A few build quirks turned up along the way too, a stale menu bar icon that needed a clean build, a lock screen icon rendering with a chequered background instead of solid black, both sorted out as part of the process.
Working out what makes it different
Once the fork was working and rebranded, the obvious question was what Apidae could offer that Lockpaw didn’t. Live agent activity, Cowork integration and usage stats were all on the table. My call was to start small: build the stats feature first, get to a polished first version, ship it, then keep adding from there, in whatever few hours a week I could give it around running Metserve Media and CCTV Aware.
Stats shipped with its own data layer and a proper settings tab, and testing carried on from there, including some early confusion over whether Apidae was actually keeping the Mac awake when the display itself still looked asleep.
The real turning point was a keep awake feature. Rather than relying on a hotkey to manually cover the screen, Apidae started automatically detecting when Claude was actively working, by watching the Claude desktop app’s own interface for signs of an agent running or waiting, and covering the display on its own, no hotkey required. Once that shipped, it quickly became the feature I actually reached for day to day. By September 2026 that had become the deliberate headline for the whole product: Apidae runs and just works on its own, no hotkeys, no hooks to install per agent. The hotkey hasn’t gone, it’s still there as an optional shortcut, but it’s no longer the pitch. It’s also where the two apps differ most clearly. Lockpaw handles multiple AI coding tools through installed hooks and a bundled CLI, while Apidae watches and reacts on its own. One thing I’ve deliberately left out is attention alerts, a notification when an agent needs input, since the official Claude app already does that natively.
Where it stands now
As of early September 2026, Apidae is at version 0.3.0, with around seventy unit tests covering the app. The automatic keep awake behaviour, the stats tracking, and a refreshed onboarding flow and about screen reflecting the new positioning are all in place. The GitHub repository is now public, with a release available to download directly from there. What’s left is mostly practical: screenshots for the README, code signing and notarisation while I sort out an Apple Developer account, and a proper landing page on getapidae.com, which so far only has an early mockup.
I’m putting Apidae out for other people to find now, including on Reddit and the usual social channels, and I’m weighing enrolling in the Apple Developer Program under Metserve Media, since other apps may well follow this one. If you’re running long Claude Code or Cowork sessions yourself, you can grab Apidae from the GitHub repository or get in touch through the contact form.