LiteStats

A lightweight, native macOS menu bar app for real-time system monitoring.

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LiteStats lives in your menu bar and gives you an instant overview of your Mac's health — CPU, memory, disk, battery, network, thermals, and more — with zero external dependencies and minimal resource usage.

Features

System Metrics

• CPU — real-time usage percentage with core count
• Memory — used vs. total RAM (matches Activity Monitor's calculation)
• Storage — free and total space on the boot volume
• Network — live upload/download speeds and local IP address

Battery (laptops)

• Charge level and charging status
• Battery health percentage and condition
• Cycle count

Diagnostics

• CPU Temperature — live reading via SMC (Apple Silicon and Intel)
• Thermal Pressure — system thermal state (Nominal / Fair / Serious / Critical)
• System Uptime — time since last boot
• Device Health Summary — automatic warnings for high CPU/RAM, low disk, degraded battery, or thermal throttling

Tools

• Process List — top memory consumers with app icons, sorted by RAM usage. Right-click to show in Finder, bring to front, quit, or force-quit.
• Performance Trends — sparkline charts tracking CPU and memory usage over the last 60 samples

Preferences

• Adjustable polling interval (1–10 seconds)
• Adjustable text size (5 levels)
• Device info at a glance

Requirements

• macOS 14.0+ (Sonoma)
• Xcode 15.3+ (to build from source)

Installation

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/8tp/LiteStats.git
cd LiteStats
open LiteStats.xcodeproj

1. Set Signing & Capabilities → Team to your Apple ID (free personal team works)
2. Press ⌘R to build and run

Or build from the command line:

xcodebuild -project LiteStats.xcodeproj -scheme LiteStats -configuration Debug build

Note: Sandboxing is disabled so IOKit battery and SMC access works without entitlements. For App Store distribution, you would need to add appropriate entitlements or use a helper process.

Architecture

LiteStats/
├── LiteStatsApp.swift                — @main entry point, MenuBarExtra scene
├── StatsModel.swift                  — @Observable polling engine (all metrics)
├── ContentView.swift                 — Menu bar panel UI and components
├── PreferencesView.swift             — Settings panel (interval, text size, device info)
├── PreferencesWindowController.swift — NSWindow wrapper for preferences
└── Assets.xcassets/                  — App icon and accent color

• StatsModel is @Observable (Swift 5.9 Observation framework) and uses a timer on the .common run-loop mode so updates continue during UI interaction.
• CPU usage is computed as a delta between successive snapshots to avoid first-read spikes.
• The app hides from the Dock and App Switcher (LSUIElement = YES).
• No external dependencies — everything is built on Foundation, SwiftUI, and IOKit.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT — see the LICENSE file for details.