Compile universal binary on existing macOS app

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Level Up Coding

2 min readNov 25, 2020

One of my side projects involved an app to display the temperature of the CPU on a MacBook. At the time I made it there wasn’t an app or functionality to display the CPU’s temperature on the menu bar of a Mac. That’s a quite useful information about the stress of the processor. So, I decided to develop it on my own. Consequently I start working with swift language and learned many interesting stuff.

The CPU’s temperature shown in the menu bar.

Here it is the simple view of this. It shows the CPU, Battery and harddisk (if any) temperature. Nothing more nothing less, it is quite essential, I known. But it had solved the problem (the need) I had.

I almost forgot the project since 2007. I wanted an app to display a number, nothing more, it worked and it was ok for me. Anyway I have been used it continuously on my MacBook. That’s how, I think, this kind of tool should work, they just need to work.

A universal app

With the recent release of Apple Silicon Macs and macOS Big Sur 11.0 I was excited by this new technologies and I wanted to investigate them more. So I decided to make an universal app. In this manner this little tool can run on both Intel and AppleSilicon Macs without emulation. In other words it doesn’t need Rosetta2 translation, which should be indeed very fast, but it is a non native way to run an app.