Every icon is an instrument. Barchestra is the conductor: the readouts you glance at, the icons you manage, and an agent that arranges the whole bar the way you say.
You: “Show battery and weather only. Hide everything when I’m
presenting. Bring CPU back if anything is pegged for a minute.”
Barchestra: done, and it tells you why when it changes anything.
Clock with world clocks and a drawn calendar glyph, live weather, battery with accessory levels, CPU, memory, disk, and network. Each module is a separate item you can place anywhere.
Show, hide, and reorder every menu-bar icon. The core mechanic requires no special permissions: no Accessibility grant and no Screen Recording. Your bar stays yours.
Compose the bar in plain English. Rules respond to power, presenting, the app in front, and sustained load. Parsing runs on-device with Apple’s foundation models. Other agents can drive the bar over MCP.
| Claim | How it holds up |
|---|---|
| No subscription for local work | One-time purchase. The agent runs on-device at no recurring cost, so there is nothing to meter. |
| Light by construction | Timers wake only when needed: the clock ticks once a minute, redraws are skipped when nothing has changed, and fast events arrive by notification instead of polling. A bar app that burns your battery has failed at its own job. |
| Private by construction | Usage analytics are a fixed vocabulary of feature counters stored on your Mac. No content, no accounts, nothing uploaded. |
| Verifiable | Every module ships with a headless self-test and negative controls. Those tests check the claims on this page. |