TapMeow

Picture this. You're in a conference room. The air conditioning is too cold. Your manager is standing. That's never good. He's going through the quarterly numbers. They're bad. He knows they're bad. You know they're bad. Everyone knows they're bad.

He starts slamming the desk. Not hard, but with that rhythmic disappointment-slam that middle management perfects over the years. Thud. "We need to do better." Thud. "This is unacceptable." Thud thud. "I want solutions, not excuses."

Your MacBook is open in front of you. You should be taking notes. You should be looking concerned. You should be nodding at the right moments. Instead, you have one thought:

I should turn on TapMeow.

Because every time his fist hits the table, your laptop would meow. And there is absolutely no version of reality where that doesn't make this meeting better.

That's TapMeow. Tap your MacBook, get a meow. A macOS menu bar app that detects physical taps on your laptop and plays a cat sound in response. It's the most useless and most important thing I've ever built.

How It Works

TapMeow uses your built-in microphone to listen for percussive impacts. A three-layer filtering system separates real taps from everything else:

• Spectral flatness: Taps are broadband (flat spectrum), speech is narrowband.
• Attack sharpness: Taps rise to peak in 1-5 samples, speech builds gradually.
• Duration filter: Rejects sustained loud sounds like music or conversation.

Your manager can yell all he wants. TapMeow won't meow. But the moment he slams that desk? Meow.

Features

• Menu bar app with pause/play controls and emoji status indicators.
• Terminal mode if you prefer the command line.
• Standalone .app distribution for Apple Silicon Macs, no Python install needed.

Built With

• Python + PyAudio for microphone input and audio processing.
• AppKit via pyobjc for the native macOS menu bar integration.
• Built entirely with Claude Code.