Ramble for Mac

The menu bar app: permissions, hotkey, links from your agent, updates.

What it is

Ramble for Mac is a recorder that lives in your menu bar. It has no Dock icon. Click the icon and a small popover opens with your account, a microphone picker with a live level meter, and Start rambling.

When you start, a three-second countdown ("Recording your screen in 3") runs on a floating island at the bottom of the screen, just above the Dock. Then Ramble records your whole display and your voice until you press stop or hit the ten-minute limit.

The island is a small capsule in Ramble's record red: a pulsing dot, a clock, a waveform and a round stop button. In the last minute the clock turns red and counts down. A button on it unfolds a panel that shows what Ramble is hearing and the notes it has taken so far. Fold it again with the same button.

When you stop, the island goes and your ramble opens in your browser, where you watch it being read and graded. The popover keeps Open and Copy link for your last ramble.

A Mac ramble is graded by the same code as one from the browser. Your voice is transcribed while you talk, and the video, screenshots and signals go up as they happen. See Your ramble for what you get.

First launch and permissions

The first time you open it, and any time a permission goes missing, Ramble opens a window with three rows: Microphone, Screen Recording and Account. Each row has one button and turns green when it is done. There is also an option to open Ramble at login.

Microphone. Press Allow when macOS asks. Ramble listens only while you record and while its popover is open, to show the level meter. If you said no earlier, the row offers Open Settings.
Screen Recording. Press Allow, switch Ramble on in System Settings (the row offers Open Settings), then come back. macOS applies this permission only to a fresh process, so Ramble then offers Relaunch. Press it.
macOS 15 and later also ask whether Ramble may capture your screen without the system's window picker. Allow it. Ramble needs it to record.
Account. See below.

If you press Start before these are done, the window opens instead of a recording failing halfway.

Signing in

Ramble opens ramble.sh in your browser. Sign in with Google and press Connect. Your rambles are saved to that account, and the sign-in stays in your Mac's Keychain. The sign-in token never appears in a link. Ramble also sends your Mac's name (for example "Alex's MacBook Pro") when you sign in, so your signed-in devices can be told apart.

The … menu at the top of the popover has your account, Sign out, the version, and Quit.

The hotkey

⌥⇧R (Option, Shift and R) starts a recording and stops one. During the countdown it cancels. On a record prompt from an agent, it presses Record.

It is on by default. The popover has a row, "Start and stop ⌥⇧R", with a switch to turn it off.
It needs no extra permission.
If you are signed out, it opens the popover on Sign in.
If macOS or another app already uses the shortcut, the popover says so under the switch in amber. Nothing else happens, and the setting is kept so the next launch tries again.
A global shortcut is taken from every other app. On a US keyboard layout ⌥⇧R types "‰", so with the switch on you can't type that character anywhere. Turn the switch off if you need it. The shortcut can't be changed yet.

Links from your agent

When a coding agent asks you to record a check, it can open a ramble://record?request=… link. Ramble accepts only that exact shape. Anything else is ignored.

When a link arrives:

If you are already recording, the island says "Already recording" for three seconds.
If you aren't signed in, the popover opens on Sign in, and nothing starts.
Otherwise Ramble checks the request with ramble.sh. If it is yours and still open, the island appears with the agent's note under Asked (the first line, at most 80 characters, shown as plain text) and a Record button. If the request has expired or isn't yours, the island says so for a few seconds. If Ramble can't reach ramble.sh, it says that.

Nothing records until you press Record (or ⌥⇧R, if the hotkey is on). Until then the microphone isn't even open. A link is somebody else's click, and it could come from an agent that was talked into it while you are away from the desk. Starting from the popover or the hotkey is your own action, and Ramble doesn't ask about that.

Record starts the normal three-second countdown. The note stays on the island during the countdown and the recording.
Esc, or the Cancel button, cancels during the countdown. While the countdown runs, Ramble takes the Esc key from other apps. That lasts the three seconds and no longer.
The close button on the prompt dismisses it. If you ignore the prompt for 60 seconds, it goes away by itself.
In every one of these cases the request stays open. Nothing was sent, so your agent keeps waiting, and it can ask again.
A second link that arrives while a prompt is up, or within about two seconds of the last one, is ignored.

Updates

Ramble checks for updates about 30 seconds after it opens and then every 6 hours. This happens only in the released app, connected to ramble.sh. It downloads the update, checks its signature, and installs it over the app on disk.

It never restarts by itself. The running app stays the old version. The popover then shows Restart to update to … with the new version. Pressing it saves any recording first.
It never runs over a recording. During a countdown, a recording, a stop, or while an earlier recording is still being sent, it waits.
Failures are quiet. There is no dialog. If the app can't replace itself (for example it was installed by an administrator, or you run it straight from the disk image), it leaves the update alone. To update that Mac, download the new disk image from /download.

What is recorded

Ramble records your whole display and your microphone. Its own windows are never in the recording: the island and the popover are left out of the capture, and they don't show in a screen share such as Zoom either.

Where it all goes is the same as for the browser. See Recording.

When something goes wrong

Event	What happens
The microphone is unplugged	Another device takes over. The gap is kept in the record, not squeezed out.
The display is unplugged, the Mac sleeps, or Screen Recording is revoked	The recording stops cleanly and keeps everything recorded so far.
The network drops	Audio is kept for 30 seconds and video stays on disk. A stop that can't finish is finished later, after a relaunch too.
You quit or relaunch while recording	The recording is stopped and saved first.
The app crashes, is killed, or you log out	The next launch uploads what was on disk and finishes the stop.
Ramble can't reach the server for too long	The recording stops and keeps what it captured, as the browser does.

When idle, Ramble is only a menu bar icon. It opens no microphone and has no timer running.

Uninstalling

Quit Ramble from the menu bar icon. If you turned on Open at login, switch it off first in System Settings, General, Login Items & Extensions.
Drag Ramble from Applications to the Trash.
To remove the saved sign-in too, delete the item sh.ramble.desktop in Keychain Access.

Rambles you recorded stay on ramble.sh until you delete them. Delete one from its own page, or delete your account and everything on it.