Kyan Bar

A demo status bar app for macOS:

This is a little app we created for the team at https://kyan.com to access popular services and also to see what's playing on our office jukebox.

Local setup

Requirements for building locally:

Ruby 3
Xcode 16

Install dependencies:

$ pod install

Open the project in Xcode:

$ open KyanBar.xcworkspace

You can now build and run the app in Xcode.

But what does it contain?

It's a bit of a template for building apps that run in the status bar on macOS. It includes:

How to adds external links via NSMenu and NSMenuItem
How to add a SwiftUI View as a custom menu item
How to add a SwiftUI Preview with example data
How to load remote JSON and render the UI using Async/Await
How to load an image with progress using AsyncImage
How to add an About pane
How to add a custom icon for the app
How to include the Sparkle update library for easy updates
How to read information from your Info.plist file

The app is written using Swift and SwiftUI and is currently targeting macOS 15 and greater.

Build for distribution

Choose Product -> Archive
Go to Window -> Organizer
Choose your app and click Distribute App
Choose Developer ID from list and then Next
Choose Upload (to send to Notary service) and then Next
Once you get a Ready to distribute status
Choose your app and click Export Notorized App
Export to builds folder in the repo
You can now zip up the app for distribution

Updates

The project uses Sparkle for updates. Here's the docs on how to create an update: https://sparkle-project.org/documentation/