Products

Why should you have to reach for Terminal.app to calculate the checksum values of downloaded files?

A question asked by justifiably annoyed macOS users

We made “Checksum Thing” to solve this very problem. It’s frustrating having to download, compile and install command-line software to solve specific problems, particularly if you’ve just had to reinstall macOS and are grinding through a bunch of software installation tasks. You shouldn’t need HomeBrew or Xcode to perform basic tasks like calculate/verify the checksum values of downloaded files.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tidy application on the App Store that would calculate the checksum values of files quickly and efficiently? That dynamically updated values in the user interface based on the changing contents of the target directory. That provided a progress bar with accurate visual feedback. That made it trivial to swap between different digest algorithms, such as MD5, SHA1 and SHA256. That rather than using the main system processor, used hardware acceleration to process files on Mac systems with the necessary capabilities. An application that was appropriately multithreaded, consumed minimal resources and performed I/O on a low-priority background thread. That used modern macOS programming frameworks, such as Swift and SwiftUI. That provided audible feedback when files arrive and have been processed. That wasn’t loaded with third party frameworks performing dubious acts on your machine. That didn’t track you, steal your data and respected your privacy. That didn’t show you advertisements every five minutes and track you across the web?

Don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place.