Mac Activity

Mac Activity is a lightweight macOS menu bar utility that shows live system metrics and opens a compact dashboard for deeper inspection.

It ships as:

• MacActivityApp: the macOS app that renders the menu bar item and popover dashboard.
• MacActivityCore: a reusable framework containing metric providers, sampling logic, preferences state, and data formatting.

Features

• Menu bar summary with configurable metrics.
• Live popover dashboard with metric cards.
• Basic network trend visualization (download/upload sparkline).
• Customizable menu bar metrics and launch behavior.
• Launch at login toggle.
• Actives cleanup surface for disk cleanup and process memory.
• Sparkle-based update checks with release, beta, and alpha channels.
• Per-metric sampling cadence (fast, medium, slow) and history tracking.
• Unit tests for core scheduling, summary formatting, preferences, snapshot/history, and dashboard model behavior.

Supported metrics

Implemented providers:

• CPU usage
• GPU usage
• Disk usage
• Swap usage
• Memory usage
• VRAM usage
• Network throughput (upload/download rates)
• Battery percentage + charging status
• Temperature from CPU/SMC or Battery when available
• Fan speed when available

Requirements

• macOS 13.0+
• Xcode 16 (recommended) with Swift 6 toolchain
• XcodeGen (only needed if you want to regenerate MacActivity.xcodeproj from project.yml)

Getting started

git clone https://github.com/bigtomcat6/mac-activity.git
cd mac-activity

Build in Xcode

1. Generate the Xcode project if you changed project.yml:

xcodegen generate

2. Open the project and run the MacActivity scheme.

open MacActivity.xcodeproj

Build / test with SwiftPM

swift test

If swift test fails due to your local Xcode/Swift setup, use Xcode and run the MacActivity test scheme.

Runtime behavior

• App launches as an accessory app with a menu bar item by default.
• Clicking the menu bar item opens the dashboard popover.
• You can disable the menu bar item in Preferences; the app remains reachable until you re-enable it.
• When launched with menu bar hidden, the app can still be recovered from the preferences flow.

Documentation

• Documentation index
• User guide
• Development guide
• Contributing guide
• Support guide
• Security policy
• Release guide

Configuration

Open Preferences and you can:

• Toggle Show menu bar item
• Toggle Launch at login
• Choose the display language
• Choose the update channel and check for updates
• Choose the temperature source
• Show hardware battery percentage when available
• Show app identifiers in Actives process rows
• Choose Disk Cleanup categories
• Choose which summary metrics appear in the menu bar

Metric order is stable (CPU -> GPU -> Disk -> Swap -> Memory -> VRAM -> Temperature -> Fan -> Network -> Battery), while some metrics may be hidden when not available on the current machine.

Architecture

The codebase is split into two targets:

• Sources/MacActivityCore
  • metric snapshot/history model
  • provider protocol and provider implementations
  • scheduler and cadence control
  • formatters and presentation models
  • persistence for user preferences
• Sources/MacActivityApp
  • status item rendering
  • popover/dashboard UI
  • app lifecycle and activation handling
  • preference window and launch-at-login integration

Contributing

Contributions are welcome.

• Open an issue describing the problem/idea.
• Include steps to reproduce for bug fixes.
• Keep changes scoped and include/update tests for behavior changes.
• For substantial changes, prefer small incremental PRs.

License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.