Bliss is a truly effective website and app blocker for MacOS. It operates on a timer system and makes disabling the block very tedious and annoying, hopefully incentivizing people to not remove the block.
First, I want to say thank you everyone for the incredible votes! I’m very grateful that people liked this project :)
Now two things I observed from the feedback:
So of those two linux support is probably the more difficult one given that my software is pretty nicely integrated with MacOS, so what I think I’ll do is polish up the MacOS version and then given all that I have already done port it to Linux. This would involve changing a bit of the code, but not that much.
I started working on the GUI:
Note the UI is very buggy and sometimes just desyncs with the CLI version and idk why so um yeah this update may take a while to get fully finished. Anyways, thanks again for all the support!
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🔥 AVD marked your project as well cooked! As a prize for your nicely cooked project, look out for a bonus prize in the mail :)
Ok so this devlog addresses the feedback given in my ship of this project. Also note:
When you’re demoing it, you have to type in the right url, youtube.com is not the full thing its www.youtube.com, but now the code should auto handle that but just in case.
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Hope you enjoy my project and find it useful!
Bliss is a macOS focus lock that blocks websites and force‑closes blocked apps. It runs a background timer, shows a menubar countdown, and makes you solve a typing challenge to escape early. It is fully configurable, from the blocked apps and websites, to the length of the quotes in the typing challenge.
curl -fsSL https://github.com/zainmarshall/bliss/releases/download/v0.1.0/bliss-macos-universal.zip -o /tmp/bliss.zip && \
rm -rf /tmp/bliss && mkdir -p /tmp/bliss && \
unzip -q /tmp/bliss.zip -d /tmp/bliss && \
bash /tmp/bliss/bliss_release/scripts/install.sh
bliss config website add <domain>bliss config app add (This will open a menu for you to select apps)bliss start <minutes>Commands
Learn more about how Bliss works by reading all the devlogs I wrote below!
Hope you guys enjoy!
Ok I said the last one would be the last, but there were so many bugs that I fixed. Error messages weren’t working, configs broken, but those all good now :)! Also I spent like 2 hours editing this video (idk why it took so long). This is the demo video to all windows and linux users who would be unable to install the app so they can still see how it would work and vote on it.
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Ok, so I think this will be my final devlog for bliss, at least for the first ship. I have made a bunch of small polishing changes. Here is a list:
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I added a config menu for blocked apps. Unlike website where I could just make it a command, bliss config website add , for apps bliss needs the path to the .app, the bundle id, and the process name. Instead of forcing the user to type this out, I thought of a much better solution: all apps live in the Applications folder, so just list out all of those files and let then select which one, and that will give bliss the direct path from where it can get all the rest of the information itself. So the way I went about this first was by using fuzzy finder, fzf, and it would just start an fzf over your apps folder when you typed bliss config app add, and then when you select one it would do all the bliss things. This is nice as fzf is fast and keyboard based, but I want bliss to require as few external installs as possible, so I made a different menu if fzf is not installed, and I think that one works pretty well. I also like made the remove menu very similar but instead of on the apps folder, its on the config file. The no fzf command has a one time search feature than a numbered list which I showed off in the second screen recording.
The first attached screen recording shows config app add and config app remove with fzf installed.
The second shows those two without fzf installed.
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During a low, blissd wakes up every few seconds and checks the blocked apps list. For each app on it, it attempts to force quit the process that matches to the app’s path or process name. MAKE SURE YOU SAVE WORK BEFORE STARTING BLISS AS IT WILL FORCEFULLY SHUTDOWN.
I have attached a simple screen recording of me trying to launch a blocked app. In this case the app I have blocked is Prism Launcher (a minecraft launcher).
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I added an install script that installs the bliss cli, blissd, and the menu bar app, and blissroot. It is under scripts/install.sh. To go along with it, I wrote an uninstall script that uninstalls the menu-bar, removes the daemons, and deletes all the config and storage files. It also cleans up /etc/hosts and the pf. It is gated by the same typing puzzle as bliss panic. Also about the blissroot I talked about above, it just makes it so that you don’t have to type sudo each time. Bliss needs to edit protected files, so for start and panic, you used to need to use sudo, but now on install it gives itself a daemon making it so you don’t need to.
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I noticed in the blocker, if you already had the tab open, for example youtube, the browser would sometimes cache the ip and thus not need to query the DNS, thus bypassing the filter. So now bliss takes the domains, gets their ips, and then stores them so those ips are blocked on a network level using a packet filter table.
Also, I cleaned up the CLI output and added bliss status. Status now shows remaining time and whether the firewall table is active. Sometimes in the code I had left placeholder output on certain commands, I removed that and made the error messages more helpful.
The attached screenshots show bliss –help and bliss status.
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I added a real config system for websites. Instead of hardcoding YouTube, Bliss now stores domains in ~/.config/bliss/blocks.txt and the CLI supports add/remove/list. When Bliss starts, it reads this file and blocks everything inside it.
The attached screen shot shows those commands being used.
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##Bliss Panic Mode
I implemented what I call “panic” mode. Currently, if you start a block of some amount of minutes, ti will run for that time and it is impossible to exit. However, that can be unsafe or impractical, lets say you end to watch a youtube video for a class assignment or smth, or you just need to break out of the block, panic mode is the way. Instead of typing in a password or just clicking Unblock for 1 hour like it is in other blocks, you have to solve a puzzle. You have to do an activity that makes this feel a lot more painful and tedious, to incentivize you to not.
Right now its very simple, its a typing test where you need to get >=95% on a quote to pass. The quotes are pulled from a quotes.txt file. This is the test I will stick to now, but later I will switch to other puzzle types, maybe solving a leetcode problem. Also for testing purposes the quotes are short, cuz I’m too lazy to type long quotes, but I will prob make them longer on release.
I have attached a screen recording showing the test after running bliss panic.
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Formerly, the way bliss worked was just by starting and stopping it (well i hadn’t coded in a real stop, so just starting it) from the terminal, and the block would kinda be this thing in the background. It didn’t feel like it was a real app, and idk that didn’t sit well with me, and also there was no interceptor of how much time had passed. To solve this I added a very very simple menubar item. It says bliss and then it is a minute and seconds countdown. It stays running the background always, and is a launch item, so using LaunchAgent it stays running all the time and launches at computer reboot. So its there any time bliss is working. It will refresh and show the active timer ticking down on a bliss start command. The menu bar is written as a very simple swift application (one main.swift file) compiled to a binary.
I attached a screen recording showing me starting a timer and the menu bar timer ticking down.
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I got the first block working, this blocks websites on any browser and is independent of the browser because what it does is filter DNS requests and not give certain websites access to the internet.
I have attached three screenshots. The first shows just what happens when you run bliss start and the second shows what it does to /etc/hosts. It modifies it such that all of the websites in the config (I haven’t implemented the config so right now its hard coded to youtube) will be added to /etc/hosts and be blocked from receiving internet. The third image just shows what happens when you try to visit the tab, no internet!
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I decided on the architecture of this project: you will primarily interact with it through a CLI and I will write it in C++ and build using CMake. I added some simple CLI fillers and a help menu with all the commands. The commands that I have so far coded in are start, panic, and config, which all just return a debug message for now. bliss –help will list all available commands.
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