// the take
AnyBar is a tiny macOS menubar app that shows a colored dot you control over a local UDP socket — send it a string like "red" or "green" and the dot changes. It's for developers who want a lightweight visual signal for build status, test runs, long-running jobs, or anything else that can fire off a UDP packet, without writing a real menubar app.
The protocol is about as simple as it gets — any language or shell that can send a UDP datagram can drive it, which is why there are a couple dozen third-party clients in Go, Python, Rust, Node, etc. with zero coupling to AnyBar's own code. It's tool-agnostic by design: nothing ties it to CI, to a specific editor, or to any monitoring stack, so people have wired it into webpack builds, IntelliJ, iTerm tabs, and Jupyter without needing AnyBar to know about any of them. Running multiple independent indicators (different ports, titles, initial colors via env vars) is supported out of the box, and custom PNGs in ~/.AnyBar let you go beyond the built-in dot styles.
UDP means fire-and-forget: if AnyBar isn't running, is on the wrong port, or the packet gets dropped, there's no error and no retry — your "build failed" signal just silently never shows up. There's no authentication on the socket at all, so any local process (or anything that can reach that port) can change or quit someone else's running instance, which matters more than it sounds on a shared or multi-user machine. It's Objective-C on an old-style Xcode project with no Swift/SwiftUI rewrite, so it's riding on aging macOS APIs and will eventually hit a wall as Apple deprecates things under it. Testing is a couple of AppleScript smoke scripts, not real coverage, so the only real signal that a change hasn't broken something is someone manually watching the dot.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →