Mornings used to be GitHub in one tab, lsof -i :3000 in a terminal, Vercel in another, Activity Monitor when the fans spun up. The menu bar is the only strip that stays put across Spaces. I ended up with five small apps that each own one of those interruptions. None of them is a dashboard.
Neat — reviews without the inbox
Neat (Free) is GitHub notifications that are not email. When someone requests a review, a native banner shows up. The popover is keyboard-driven. Auth took a few minutes; I turned off repos I barely touch.
It is GitHub only. GitLab and Bitbucket are out. I would rather have a narrow tool than another “all forges” panel that misses the ping I care about. During deep work it sits behind Do Not Disturb except for reviews where I am tagged.
Find My Ports — the stuck Next.js server
Find My Ports ($20, one machine) lists bound ports with process, CPU, and often the Git branch. One click kills a zombie Node process. macOS 14+.
I used to muscle-memory lsof. I still missed leftovers from a previous client’s stack. The Vercel-adjacent view in the same panel is extra; the port list is why it stays installed. If you are not juggling two local servers, skip it.
Deplog — the red deploy before Slack does
Deplog (Mac App Store, one-time) watches Vercel. Token in Keychain. The icon walks through the deploy; failures are obvious without a browser tab. If you are not on Vercel, this app is invisible. That is acceptable.
MissionBar — fans before Activity Monitor
MissionBar (Free, open-source) is CPU, memory, and PIDs in the bar. Early: it cannot kill processes yet. Read-only is still faster than launching Activity Monitor mid-compile. MIT, GitHub, tiny CPU.
Maccy — the command I copied before the JWT
Maccy (Free; optional $9.99 on the App Store) stores clipboard history locally in SQLite. Command+Shift+C, fuzzy search. It ignores 1Password by default. When Neat surfaces a failing test, I copy the fix, jump to the terminal, and pull the command back from history instead of hoping I did not overwrite it.
How they sit together
Neat says which PR. Find My Ports says the local server is actually up. Deplog says the deploy landed. MissionBar says Docker did not eat the machine. Maccy remembers the curl. I installed them one at a time, a week apart. Start with whichever interruption you hit this morning — not with a five-icon shopping list.