Menu Bar Apps Tools

CPU, memory, battery, network, disk, GPU, temperature and fans in your menu bar. You pick which ones show, and a click opens the detail behind it. Compact Health folds the whole machine into one item that stays quiet until something's off. MIT, macOS 15+.

PRNotch puts your GitHub pull requests in your Mac's notch review queue, CI state, and alerts in a native menu bar app. No telemetry. $1 once.

Push-to-talk dictation that inserts in place: hold fn, speak, release, and the text appears in the app your cursor is already in. Transcription runs locally with whisper.cpp + Metal, so your audio never leaves the Mac. An optional on-device cleanup pass strips filler words and fixes punctuation. Most dictation apps show you a recording dot or a generic soundwave. This one has hand-animated indicators. $10 once, no subscription. MIT source. macOS 14+, Apple silicon.

Yap turns speech into text anywhere you can type on your Mac. Set a hotkey, talk, press it again, and the words get pasted into whatever field you were in. It runs entirely on device using macOS 26's speech APIs, so there's no model to download and nothing leaves your machine. It's around 3,000 lines of native Swift in a 4 MB app that idles near 60 MB of memory. Free, MIT licensed, and built by Frigade because we wanted it for ourselves.

BlackFlare - a native macOS menu bar app for Claude Code and Codex. Keep your Mac awake during long runs, get notified when a session finishes or needs you, switch your defaults from the menu, and watch plan usage — all on-device.

Local-first macOS menu-bar companion for Claude and Cursor usage. Glance at limits without a browser tab. No AgentQuartz cloud account — settings stay on your machine. Free forever for essentials; Pro is a one-time $3 unlock for tray customization. Unofficial.

Notate is for anything where pointing beats describing: design and motion review, product walkthroughs, code review, and handoffs. Unlike screenshot tools, it freezes open menus, hover and focus states before they disappear, or records a flow so you can pin the exact frame where an animation breaks. Gesture-based annotation keeps the flow fast; smart crop and reopenable sessions preserve the image, comments, and context so feedback stays useful when it reaches a teammate or an agent.

CodexBar Lite is a native macOS menu bar app that keeps your OpenAI Codex usage visible at a glance. It uses your existing Codex CLI session - no browser cookies, Keychain permissions, API keys, or third-party accounts required. Monitor usage, reset times, and receive notifications, all from a lightweight, open-source app.

TouchGrass is a context-aware break reminder built for macOS. Most break reminders only know one thing: time. TouchGrass waits through meetings, calls, media playback and screen recordings, counts time away from your Mac as a completed break, and reminds you to blink, improve your posture and rest after long typing sessions. Everything runs locally, never asks for Accessibility permission, and respects your workflow. 7 day free trial, then a one time purchase of $3.99 with lifetime updates.

Most notch utilities just draw a static shape over the cutout. Islet actually behaves like iPhone's Dynamic Island: native spring-physics expand/collapse, real-time HUDs for volume and brightness, a live music glance with full playback controls, one-tap audio output switching (no System Settings detour), plus calendar, weather, and a file tray you can drop into from anywhere. Built natively in Swift + AppKit, not Electron, fast and fullscreen-aware.

Hotspot Meter is a free macOS menu-bar app that shows exactly how much data each Wi-Fi network and phone hotspot uses. See live download and upload speeds, track session and per-network totals, review usage history, and get an alert before reaching your data cap. Everything runs locally on your Mac: no analytics, no accounts, and no personal data collected or transmitted.

You've been at your desk for six hours. Haven't had water since breakfast. Neck locked in one position, eyes dry from the screen. You didn't even notice until now. HealthyNotch lives quietly in your Mac's notch and nudges you before it gets that far: stand up, drink water, blink, stretch. No dock icon, no logging, no dashboards. One-time payment, lifetime access, no subscription.

Chimlo is a free, open-source macOS app that puts Codex and Claude Code in your MacBook notch. See which agents are working, waiting, finished, or failed. Answer Claude Code questions, review permission requests, and check provider usage without hunting through terminal windows. Chimlo also handles media, volume, and brightness controls, with animated pixel companions that make every state easy to spot.

Ombrelle quietly dims everything except your active window no clutter, no noise, just what matters right now. Switch between Focus, Flow, or Evening. You'll only really feel what it does the day you turn it off.

Define a region of your screen to be shared from your ultrawide or high resolution monitor, preventing the inevitable "can you zoom in?" that comes with sharing the entire screen. Define any size region to share, move apps in and out of the region seamlessly, resize the region on the fly, set a default region and invoke with a keyboard shortcut for quick and easy sharing. Blur for privacy. Scaled presenter view displays the content your viewers are seeing. Integrated annotations and whiteboard.

Rewisp gives your Mac a memory. It reads your screen text on-device and remembers it for you. Catches promises like "I'll send it Friday" and reminds you until it's done. Ask "what changed since Tuesday?" and see exactly what's new. Search by meaning, not just words. Tracks numbers like weight or grades over time. Fills forms from your saved details — never passwords. One quiet 9 PM summary each day. Fully private: screenshots never saved, only text stays on your Mac.

Pocket Screen turns the frontmost window on your Mac into a compact, always-on-top PiP-style view. Keep documents, chats, videos, or reference material visible while you work in another app—without constantly switching windows. Processing stays on your Mac.

QuickQuill records your meetings and turns them into transcripts and summaries, and nothing is ever sent to the cloud. No bot joins the call, and it keeps working with Wi-Fi off, which is how the demo video was recorded. It also shows live subtitles with translation while you record, and there's push-to-talk dictation for any app. No account, no subscription. Dictation is free forever, and a single $49 purchase unlocks the full meeting workflow. Requires macOS 26 on Apple Silicon.

Your Mac sleeps mid-download, mid-render, mid-agent-run. Keepresso keeps it awake exactly when it should, with smart triggers, timed sessions, closed-display mode, and a headless-Mac toolkit. Native menu-bar app. Free, open source, macOS 14+.

AutoShelf is a macOS app that watches your folders and auto-organizes files. Set a rule once and never think about it again. Free to try, unlock unlimited for $19.99.

See your Kickbacks.ai status, live earnings, and ad history in the terminal and Mac menu bar.