Barakah 0.2.0
Prayer times in your menu bar, with iqama reminders and media that actually stops.
Download
Barakah_0.2.0_universal.dmg — 3.1 MB. Apple Silicon and Intel. Needs macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.
Open the .dmg and drag Barakah into your Applications folder.
First launch needs one extra step
Barakah is not signed with a paid Apple Developer certificate, so macOS will
refuse to open it the first time and say it "could not verify Barakah is free
of malware." macOS says this about anything not signed with a $99/year
certificate. To let it through:
- Click Done on the warning.
- Open System Settings → Privacy & Security.
- Scroll to the bottom. There is a line: "Barakah was blocked to protect your Mac."
- Click Open Anyway, then confirm and enter your password.
One time only. After that it opens normally.
There is no Dock icon — Barakah lives in the menu bar. Look for the crescent
near your clock.
New in 0.2.0
An adhan is now included, and plays by default. Nothing to set up — install
it and the next prayer is called properly.
If you would rather hear a particular muezzin, drag your own recording onto the
welcome window at first launch, or use Settings → Athan → Choose a file…
later. Whatever you add is level-matched on playback, so the volume slider
means the same thing for every recording.
What it does
Prayer times for wherever you are, calculated on your Mac. No account, no
server, works offline. Muslim World League, ISNA, Umm al-Qura, Egyptian,
Karachi, Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait, Singapore, Diyanet, Tehran and Moonsighting are
all there, along with both Asr conventions and high-latitude rules. If your
masjid's printed timetable is a minute or two off, you can nudge each prayer
individually.
Iqama reminders — the thing most prayer apps miss. Iqama is whatever your
masjid decided, so Barakah asks you, per prayer, in the two shapes masjids
actually use: "Athan + 10 minutes", or a fixed time like "Dhuhr is always
1:30". Then it reminds you a few minutes before, which is the alert you
actually need. Friday gets its own Jumu'ah setting.
Reminders are scheduled with macOS ahead of time, so they still arrive if
Barakah was quit or your Mac just woke up.
Media that stops. When the athan begins, whatever you were listening to
pauses — Spotify, Music, VLC, QuickTime, and video in Safari, Chrome or Arc. It
comes back afterwards if you want it to. Barakah only ever sends an explicit
pause, never a play/pause toggle, so it can never accidentally start music in
the middle of the adhan. And it only resumes playback it genuinely interrupted.
The athan plays in full. Most apps attach the adhan to a notification sound,
which macOS cuts off at 30 seconds and will not let you stop. Barakah plays it
itself, so it runs its whole length — and one click on the menu bar icon stops
it, from anywhere.
About the included recording
The adhan that ships with Barakah is "Muslim calling to prayer" by the
Wikimedia contributor Aishatu98, released under
CC0 1.0 — a dedication to
the public domain. Attribution is not required; it is given here anyway.
Choosing it took some care. The words of the adhan are about 1400 years old and
belong to everyone, but a recording is a separate work carrying the muezzin's
performance rights and the recording copyright. No mosque or well-known muezzin
has released one under a free licence, and sites offering free adhan downloads
are offering them to listen to — free of charge is not free to redistribute.
Amateur field recordings whose recordist dedicated them are, in practice, the
only freely-licensed adhan audio that exists.
assets/NOTICE.md
documents the full provenance, and which candidates were rejected — including
widely-reused files that claim CC0 but are measurably re-encoded commercial
recordings.
Permissions it asks for
- Location — to calculate prayer times where you are. You can type in a city instead.
- Notifications — for the iqama reminders.
- Automation — to pause Spotify, Music, VLC and QuickTime.
Everything is computed on your Mac. Barakah opens no network connections of its
own, and has no accounts, analytics or telemetry.