This New Mac App Uses Animated Flies to Tell You When to Take Out the Trash

I don’t think I’m going too far when I say that not everyone agrees on the best way to manage their computer’s recycle bin. Some prefer to let it sit until their computer screams at them about storage, while others empty it every day. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I try not to let it go too much. And I think I found the best tool for that a few days ago: Bananabin.

When the data stored in your Trash folder exceeds a certain threshold, Bananabin surrounds itself with animated, buzzing flies that you can chase away with your mouse. That’s it. That’s the app.

You can configure the theft threshold from the application icon in the menu bar; the three options are Janitor mode (10 MB), The Recycler (1 GB), and Garbage Hoarder (10 GB). The app is free at the moment, while it is in beta. Leon Schrijvers, one of the developers of Bananabin, said in an email to The edge that they are still working on some bugs (heh). Flies won’t appear if you keep an iCloud Trash, nor if you keep the folder on an external drive. Additionally, it only works for macOS Sonoma at the moment, although they plan to add support for macOS Ventura later.

Something to note: Bananabin requires Accessibility and Full Disk Access permissions to work. The app’s website states that this allows it to find the Trash directory and check when it’s full. This seems plausible, but it’s something to be aware of, in case this is an issue for you.

If that sounds good to you, you can try the app by going to the Bananabin website (here’s the link again). You need to provide an email address to get a download link.