I made a desktop app called Ear Transit! It’s a tiny tool that lets you listen to background noise on your computer even if you’re not connected to the internet. It currently has 4 background noises at the moment, but I’ll be adding more pretty soon. Right now it only runs on Windows, so I’m also hoping to port it to other operating systems when I find the time.

It’s written in HTML, CSS, and JS using the Sciter Engine, but I actually started out by building a prototype using Lazarus / Free Pascal. I loved the drag-and-drop interface builder and that it compiles everything to native code, but I struggled with it because I’m unfamiliar with the language and the tooling. I guess I’m just impatient, but I eventually gave up and went with the web development tools because that’s more familiar to me. I chose Sciter over Electron because of the small runtime—the whole thing weighs about 8MB compared to Electron which is at 80MB. I wanted the app to be as small as possible because all it does is play audio files.

The app at launch uses only 13MB of RAM so I’m very pleased with the leanness of the app. The memory usage does grow as you play the background noises though because the MP3s are loaded into RAM so I’ll have to look into ways of minimizing that.

Head on over to itch.io to download Ear Transit! I hope you like it. I also recently released the code on Sourcehut.