Blink

A little robot that lives in your menu bar and keeps an eye on your running dev servers and iOS simulators.

Features

• Live server monitoring — every dev server running on your machine, with port, framework and project name
• Restart without leaving the menu bar — stop and relaunch a dev server in one click, no terminal, no rebuild
• Failures explained in place — when a restart doesn't come back, the row shows why, with the full output one click from your clipboard
• Framework detection — Next.js, Vite, Nuxt, Remix, Astro, Django, Flask, Rails and more, each with its own colour
• Simulator tracking — booted simulators with device name, runtime, and the app running inside
• Relaunch an app in the simulator — terminate and launch without going back to Xcode
• One-click stop — a single server, or everything in a section
• Open in the browser — click a row to jump to localhost
• Start at login — so it's there when you are

Install

Download Blink — open the DMG, drag to Applications.

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later.

Updates

Blink doesn't check for updates, and doesn't talk to the network at all.

To hear about new versions, use Watch → Custom → Releases on this repo and GitHub will email you.

How It Works

Blink polls every few seconds using standard macOS tools:

• Port scanning — lsof to find listening TCP ports
• Framework detection — inspects process arguments and working directory
• Project names — reads package.json, Cargo.toml, or falls back to the directory name
• Simulators — xcrun simctl for booted simulator data

Restarting is less obvious than it sounds. The process holding a port often can't be relaunched from its own arguments — Next.js and npm both overwrite their argv with a display title, and argv[0] is usually a bare name like node rather than a path. So Blink reads the real arguments and the resolved binary from the kernel, and walks up the parent chain to find a process that can actually be launched again, never straying outside the server's own project directory.

No background daemons, no elevated permissions, no network access. Everything runs locally.

Tech

• SwiftUI, in an NSPanel hung off an NSStatusItem
• Swift concurrency (async/await, TaskGroup)
• @Observable for reactive state
• SMAppService for start at login
• macOS 14+ (Sonoma)

Contributing

PRs welcome. Keep it clean.

1. Fork it
2. Create your branch (git checkout -b feature/thing)
3. Commit (git commit -m 'Add thing')
4. Push (git push origin feature/thing)
5. Open a PR

Author

Built by Mo

License

MIT