BadgeBar

Mirror app unread badges (Mail, Slack, Microsoft Teams, …) into the macOS menu bar, so you never miss a message while working full-screen or on a second display where the Dock isn't visible.

A modern, Apple-Silicon-native rewrite of the idea behind Doll — built with current SwiftUI, the Observation framework, and Swift Concurrency, targeting macOS 14+.

How it works

macOS apps don't expose their unread count through any public API. The only reliable way to read it is from the Dock: apps render the count onto their Dock tile, and the Dock exposes it via the Accessibility API as the tile's AXStatusLabel attribute.

BadgeBar walks the Dock's accessibility tree once per second and copies the badge of each monitored app into its own menu-bar status item. (Accessibility can't notify on attribute changes, so a 1-second poll is used — it costs well under a millisecond.)

This means you must grant BadgeBar the Accessibility permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility), otherwise nothing can be read.

Install

Homebrew

brew install --cask ahmetrende/tap/badgebar

Then open it once via right-click → Open (see step 3 below), and grant Accessibility permission.

Manual (DMG)

1. Download BadgeBar.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open it and drag BadgeBar into Applications.
3. First launch: because the app isn't notarized by Apple, double-clicking shows a security warning. Right-click the app → Open → Open (you only need to do this once). Alternatively, run:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/BadgeBar.app

4. Grant Accessibility permission when prompted (required to read badges).

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later, Apple Silicon or Intel.

Build & run (no Xcode required)

Only the Swift toolchain from Command Line Tools is needed.

./run.sh          # build release, sign, (re)launch
# or
./build.sh        # just build BadgeBar.app
open BadgeBar.app

build.sh compiles the package, assembles BadgeBar.app, and code-signs it. Run ./setup-signing.sh once to create a stable self-signed identity — then the Accessibility grant survives rebuilds. Without it, build.sh falls back to ad-hoc signing. The package also opens directly in Xcode (open Package.swift).

Note: with ad-hoc signing (i.e. before running setup-signing.sh), macOS may ask you to re-grant the Accessibility permission after each rebuild, because the binary's signature changes.

Usage

1. Launch the app — it lives only in the menu bar (no Dock icon).
2. On first run the picker opens. Search for an app and click Add.
3. Grant Accessibility permission when prompted.
4. The app's icon appears in the menu bar; its badge (the same count the Dock shows) updates every second.
   • Left-click an icon → show the app, or hide it if it's already frontmost (toggle).
   • Right-click (or ⌥-click) → menu (Configure…, Stop monitoring, Quit).

When nothing is monitored — or when you enable Always show a BadgeBar icon — a small bell icon stays in the menu bar for access (left-click opens Settings, right-click for Configure/Quit). If Accessibility access is missing, a warning icon appears there instead; click it to grant access.

Settings

The configuration window has two tabs:

• Apps — search installed apps to add/remove them, and drag the monitored list to reorder how icons appear in the menu bar.
• Settings:
  • Menu bar
    • Show unread count — off shows a small red dot instead of the number.
    • Only show an app when it has a notification — hides the icon until there's an unread badge.
    • Dim the icon when there's no notification — greys it out instead of hiding.
    • Hide an app when it isn't running — removes the icon while closed.
    • Always show a BadgeBar icon — keep a permanent menu-bar entry.
  • On-screen alert — a floating alert that appears briefly on top of everything (including full-screen apps) when a new message arrives. Toggle on/off and choose how long it stays (2 / 4 / 6 s). Click it to open the app.
  • General — Launch at login (via SMAppService), a Poll interval (1 / 2 / 5 s) to trade latency for fewer wakeups, and Check for Updates….
  • Permissions — Accessibility status with a deep-link to System Settings. If access is revoked while running, a warning icon appears in the menu bar.

Per-app overrides: right-click an app's menu-bar icon → This app to override Show unread count or the floating alert just for that app.

The UI is localized (English / Turkish, following your system language).

Performance

BadgeBar runs in the background all day, so each 1 Hz poll is kept as cheap as possible:

• Cached Dock tiles. Each monitored app's Dock tile AXUIElement is cached, so a normal poll costs just one attribute read per app — not a full Accessibility tree walk. A walk happens only when a tile goes stale (app quit, Dock restarted), and is backed off to ~every few seconds for apps that have no tile at all.
• No redundant drawing. A menu-bar icon is re-rendered only when its badge (or a display setting) actually changes — not 86 400 times a day.
• Event-driven running state. "Hide when not running" uses a set kept up to date by workspace launch/quit notifications, instead of enumerating every process each second.
• No-op writes skipped and the settings window is torn down on close, so the installed-apps list and its Spotlight query don't linger in memory while idle.

Measured idle cost (3 monitored apps, Apple Silicon): ~0.3 % of a single core and ~11 MB of private (dirty) memory.

App icon

generate-icon.swift draws the icon (a bell + red badge) programmatically and exports an .iconset. To regenerate:

swift generate-icon.swift
iconutil -c icns AppIcon.iconset -o AppIcon.icns

build.sh copies AppIcon.icns into the app bundle automatically.

Packaging a release

./make-dmg.sh     # builds the app and produces BadgeBar.dmg

Upload the resulting BadgeBar.dmg to a GitHub Release. The build is self-signed (not notarized), so users open it once via right-click → Open (see Install). If you later enroll in the Apple Developer Program ($99/yr), you can sign with a Developer ID and notarize for a friction-free install.

Project layout

Package.swift                  SwiftPM manifest (macOS 14+, Swift language mode 5)
Info.plist                     Bundle metadata (LSUIElement agent app)
build.sh / run.sh              CLI build + sign + launch
make-dmg.sh                    Package BadgeBar.dmg for distribution
setup-signing.sh               One-time stable self-signed identity (dev)
generate-icon.swift            Generates the app icon
Sources/BadgeBar/
  main.swift                   NSApplication bootstrap (.accessory)
  AppDelegate.swift            Wires the model, monitor, status bar, window
  Models.swift                 MonitoredApp + AppStore (@Observable, persisted)
  Settings.swift               UserDefaults-backed display settings
  Accessibility.swift          AX permission check/prompt
  BadgeReader.swift            Reads AXStatusLabel from the Dock (cached tiles)
  BadgeMonitor.swift           1 Hz poll loop + new-message detection
  RunningApps.swift            Event-driven running-app set
  InstalledApps.swift          Spotlight-based app discovery
  StatusItemController.swift   One NSStatusItem per app + click handling
  AppLauncher.swift            Open / toggle / activate apps
  BadgeIcon.swift              Renders icon + red badge for the menu bar
  AlertPresenter.swift         Floating on-screen alert on new messages
  SettingsView.swift           SwiftUI settings window

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. To hack on it: clone, run ./run.sh, and edit. No Xcode required to build the app (though Package.swift opens in Xcode too).

Unit tests cover the pure logic (badge-change detection, version comparison, model persistence). Run them with swift test — this needs XCTest, which ships with Xcode, so it runs in CI (GitHub Actions, .github/workflows/ci.yml) even if your local machine only has the Command Line Tools.

License

MIT © 2026 Ahmet Rende. In the spirit of the original Doll — use, modify, and redistribute freely.