Blackhole 2020
A whimsical secure file eraser born from a very bad year
Born from a very bad year. A secure file eraser for macOS and Windows that makes deleting data feel like a ceremony. Cryptographic overwrite. Playful animations.
> the problem
It started as a sketch in my notebook, a joke about how bad 2020 was. Everything that year felt like it was just getting sucked into a blackhole. So I thought: why not make that literal? A fun, animated app that sucks your files into oblivion.
> the approach
I wanted the actual erasure to be technically sound without overcomplicating it. Modern SSDs make old-school multi-pass methods obsolete, so Blackhole 2020 uses a single-pass cryptographic random overwrite and scrubs file metadata. Simple, effective, and sufficient for personal use. The real focus was on the experience: playful animations, a sense of ceremony around letting go of files. Built natively for macOS in SwiftUI and for Windows in C# UWP/WPF.
> the lessons
A cross-platform app that makes data security feel delightful instead of paranoid. Open source on GitHub. I also wrote a multi-part series on Medium documenting the full journey from concept to completion.