New Mac App Uses Animated Flies to Remind You to Take Out the Trash

Hey, everyone! Let’s talk about handling the trash on your computer. We all have our own way of dealing with it—some of us wait until our computer screams about storage, while others are more diligent, emptying it daily. I'm somewhere in the middle, but I like to keep it under control. Recently, I found a fantastic tool for this: Bananabin.

Bananabin is a fun little app that adds a visual reminder to take out your digital trash. When your Trash folder exceeds a certain size, it surrounds the folder with buzzing, animated flies that you can shoo away with your mouse. That's it. Simple and effective. You can set the fly threshold from the app's icon in the menu bar with three options: Janitor Mode (10MB), The Recycler (1GB), and Garbage Hoarder (10GB).

Currently, the app is free during its beta phase. One of the developers, Leon Schrijvers, mentioned they plan to charge a small, one-time fee for the release version. They are still ironing out some bugs—the flies won’t appear if your Trash is in iCloud or on an external drive. Right now, it only works on macOS Sonoma, but they’re looking to add support for macOS Ventura soon.

One thing to note: Bananabin requires accessibility and full disk access permissions to function. Schrijvers explained:

“For BananaBin, we need accessibility permission to read the position of the bin in the dock. As for full disk access, we need this to calculate the disk space the bin is taking up. When this space exceeds the configured threshold, the flies will appear.”

If you're cool with that, you can try Bananabin by heading to their website. You'll need to provide an email address to get the download link. Happy cleaning!