macOS menu-bar monitor
Bubo sits in your menu bar and tells you what is wrong in one line, names the app doing it, and quits it in one click. Native on Apple Silicon and Intel, no daemon, no sudo.
Version 1.4. Apple Silicon for M1 through M5. Intel for older Macs.
⚠ Memory is tight. Google Chrome is using 1.6 GB. Quit it if you don't need it.
the difference
A slow Mac is usually one greedy app. Activity Monitor keeps that answer behind a window and a dozen columns you have to read yourself. Bubo keeps it in the corner of your screen and does the reading. The dot turns amber, then red, and one click opens a line naming the app and what to do. Quitting it is still your call; Bubo never acts on its own.
what one click opens
One line at the top of the panel: what is wrong, which app is doing it, and one thing to do about it. Memory pressure, a runaway in the background, throttling from heat, a startup disk close to full. Bubo only advises, so the quit is still your click. When nothing is wrong it says all healthy.
The eight heaviest processes, grouped per app, each with its own quit button. This is the whole point.
Overall load, then a row per core tier with a bar for every core in it, that tier's usage and its speed. Temperature, hotspot, pressure and fan sit under the bar, the fan against its own floor and ceiling so the RPM means something. The badge says throttling in plain words when it gets hot.
Used against total, broken into app, wired, compressed, cached and free, so you see what your RAM is actually spent on. The figures agree with Activity Monitor, per app and for the system. DRAM bandwidth too, and pressure read from the OS rather than guessed at.
Usage, frequency and power draw, read from the same private sensors as the temperatures.
The same charge macOS itself reports, plus drain or charge rate, adapter watts, cycles, health and cell temperature.
Live throughput sparklines for both, auto-scaled from bytes to gigabytes per second.
Per-rail draw for CPU, GPU, Neural Engine and DRAM, whatever your chip exposes.
Purge the disk cache, or quit every heavy app at once, with a confirmation first.
Power, temperatures, fan speed and DRAM bandwidth come from private Apple frameworks that need no root. Everything else is plain macOS APIs. Two Swift files, no Electron.
before you install
Activity Monitor shows you numbers and leaves you to read them. Bubo does that part for you. It says memory is tight and Chrome is holding 4 GB of it, then quits Chrome in one click. Same data, one line instead of a dozen columns.
Bubo is a lean native binary with no background daemon. It samples on a light interval and stays out of the way otherwise.
Power, temperature and fan readings come from Apple's own private frameworks that need no root, no kernel extension and no sudo. Everything else is plain macOS APIs. Bubo never asks for your password, and nothing of it keeps running once you quit it.
Apple Silicon (M1–M5) for the full panel. Intel for the essentials: CPU, memory, top apps, battery, network and disk. Both follow your system light and dark.
Keep your focus,
ignore the distraction.
get bubo
Version 1.4. Open the .dmg and drag Bubo to Applications. macOS quarantines anything downloaded from the web, so the first launch is right-click, then Open, once. After that it opens normally.