The Apple Mouse charging port is a weird design, because while charging the mouse it cannot be used. Aesthetics won out over user productivity.

On the one hand I appreciate that one hour of charging time every few weeks is a marginal outage. Infrequent enough that the disruption is almost forgotten each time.

Though on the other hand Mac OS is pretty unusable without a mouse. So my expensive iMac is bricked because the mouse has lies upside down with cable plugged into its belly.

But hey, I can appreciate the nice aesthetic while I sit and watch it charging. Oh wait..there's no pop-up charging indicator either, so I just guess when it's 100% 😡

And my mouse alway seems to run out of power when I'm fully into whatever I'm doing. Does this just happen to me?

I just couldn't stand it anymore, so I built a battery level warning script that I run in the background. If the mouse or keyboard fall below 20% charge then I get a simple pop-up window.

It's a gentle reminder to charge when I next leave my desk. No rush, no outage, because with 20% I still have a few days of battery left. I typically just plug it in when I finish that day.

tomtastic made some good improvements to the inner workings. And we made sure only two pop-up reminders per day, which feels about right.

It's a pretty simple bash script run from cron. Aesthetics may have won the design process at Apple, but we can solve the productivity problem it caused.

It's on GitHub: MagicPowerAlert

I got a pop-up this morning, which reminded me of the script running quietly in the background. And I am out for a meeting this afternoon, so I'll plug it in before I go. Whenever the pop-up appears it feels like a little win over poor design.