IDOTaskMaster

IDOTaskMaster

A native macOS system monitor / task manager with a deep, power-user feature set, presented in Activity Monitor's native visual language — SF Pro, standard controls, subtle filled-area graphs, correct light & dark appearance. No neon, no custom fonts, no upsells: every page is unlocked, free.

Built with SwiftUI + AppKit interop + Canvas drawing, reading live metrics straight from host_processor_info, vm_statistics64, libproc, IOKit, and friends — no helper daemons, no IPC. Providers that can't read a metric say "Unavailable" instead of guessing.

Features

Live monitoring

• Summary — dashboard with CPU/Temp/GPU capacity towers, a tabbed CPU Overview graph (Utilization / Temperature / Kernel), top CPU processes, memory utilization band, and a tile grid for Disks / Network / Energy / GPU / NPU / Thermals.
• Performance — master-detail page with a live sparkline rail (CPU, Memory, GPU, NPU, Disks, Network, Energy, Thermals) and rich per-domain detail: per-core CPU graphs, GPU Overall/Engines tabs, disk & network throughput, battery/power state, per-die thermal sensors.
• Processes and Users — grouped Applications/Background process tree with a full identity/lifetime/processor/memory/disk detail pane; per-user rollups.
• System Info — a system_profiler-style Hardware / Network / Software catalog with key-value detail and Reload.
• Startup Apps and Services — LaunchAgent/Daemon and launchctl listings with enable/disable and detail panes.

Power-user tools (free, no license required)

• Power & Freq — an HWiNFO-style live sensor tree (Value/Min/Max) for CPU/GPU/SSD.
• Connections — per-process socket table with exposure classification (loopback/LAN/Internet) and filter chips.
• Network Monitor — a persistent outbound-connection log: which apps talked to which hosts and when, with app icons, opt-in per-host country lookup, and a New Outbound Host alert rule.
• USB & Ports — every physical USB-C/MagSafe port with live volts/amps/watts, the attached cable's e-marker identity, the negotiated link speed with a cable-vs-device diagnosis, port health (liquid detection, fault counters), the USB device tree, and an explicit cable-health test that catches marginal cables a link rate can't show.
• Installed Apps — /Applications scan with sizes, related-files finder, and Uninstall.
• Disk Space — async scanner, bubble visualization, file-type legend, largest folders/files.
• Clean Up — clear app caches, logs, and developer-tool build output, with everything routed through the Trash.
• Benchmarks — CPU (single/multi-core), GPU compute, Disk R/W (with a target-disk picker), Internet down/up (with a network-interface picker), plus an aggregate Score page with run history.

Extras

• Menu bar extra with a live compact readout and popover mini-dashboard (keeps collecting with the main window closed).
• Dock icon live graph.
• Alert rules (CPU/memory/disk/battery/new listening port thresholds) → native notifications.
• Persistent history (SQLite) with 24h/7d charts per domain.
• Per-process network traffic (Network Usage page).
• Extended process actions: suspend/resume, renice, kill tree, Open Files & Ports, code-signing status.
• ⌘K command palette, CSV/JSON export, one-click system snapshot report, battery health trend.

Screenshots

Performance	Processes

System Info	Benchmarks

Network Monitor	USB & Ports

Requirements

• macOS 13.0 or later (Apple silicon is the primary target; Intel is best-effort).
• Xcode 15 or later to build.
• XcodeGen only if IDOTaskMaster.xcodeproj needs to be regenerated from project.yml (e.g. a fresh clone before the project file exists) — brew install xcodegen. The committed .xcodeproj is normally enough on its own.

Building & running

All common tasks are one-line scripts in scripts/ (see each file's header for details):

scripts/run.sh        # build (Debug) and launch, like a normal double-click
scripts/debug.sh       # build (Debug) and run under lldb — prints/NSLog stream here
scripts/build.sh       # just compile: scripts/build.sh [Debug|Release]

Or open IDOTaskMaster.xcodeproj in Xcode and hit Run — same target either way.

Some data (SMC sensors, other users' processes, full connection info) may be restricted by macOS permissions; affected providers degrade gracefully instead of failing outright.

Packaging for distribution

scripts/release.sh     # optimized Release build -> dist/IDOTaskMaster.app
scripts/dmg.sh          # -> dist/IDOTaskMaster-<version>.dmg (Finder drag-to-Applications)
scripts/pkg.sh          # -> dist/IDOTaskMaster-<version>.pkg (double-click installer)

dmg.sh and pkg.sh build a Release copy first if dist/IDOTaskMaster.app doesn't exist yet. Builds are ad-hoc/unsigned by default, which is fine for running on the machine that built them. To produce a properly signed build — required before notarizing or sharing with another Mac under Gatekeeper — pass your Apple Developer Team ID:

DEVELOPMENT_TEAM=ABCDE12345 scripts/release.sh
INSTALLER_SIGN_IDENTITY="Developer ID Installer: Your Name (TEAMID)" scripts/pkg.sh

Project structure

IDOTaskMaster/
├─ App/           # @main, window/menu/shortcut chrome, menu bar extra, Dock icon, settings
├─ Core/          # Sampler tick loop, Snapshot model, in-memory + SQLite history, alerts
├─ Providers/     # one type per metric domain (CPU, Memory, GPU, Disk, Network, …)
├─ Benchmarks/    # CPU/GPU/Disk/Internet benchmark runners
├─ Components/    # HistoryGraph, CapacityBar, DataTable, StatTile, DetailPane, Exporter…
├─ Pages/         # one SwiftUI view per sidebar page
└─ Theme/         # per-domain color tokens (macOS palette)

Status

Feature-complete: every monitoring page, power-user tool, alert/history system, menu bar extra, Dock icon, and the MCP server below are implemented.

MCP Server

IDOTaskMasterMCP is a second, standalone command-line target — a Model Context Protocol server that lets an AI assistant (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any MCP client) query this Mac's live system-monitoring data over stdio, the same data the GUI app collects. It reuses Core//Providers/ directly (xcodegen compiles those same source folders into both targets — see project.yml), so its readings come from the exact same host_processor_info/vm_statistics64/IOKit/libproc code paths as the GUI app, not a reimplementation.

Read-only, full stop. Every tool below maps to a sample()/query call — never a write method. Nothing here can kill/suspend/renice a process, run a benchmark, toggle a startup item, uninstall an app, or otherwise change anything on this Mac.

Tools

Tool	What it returns
get_summary	One-shot CPU/memory/GPU/disk/network/energy/thermal/NPU snapshot + process count
list_processes	Every running process (name/user filter, limit)
get_top_processes	Summary dashboard's "Top CPU processes" table
get_process_detail	One PID's full detail + code-signing status + open files/sockets
get_system_info	Hardware/Network/Software catalog (system_profiler-backed)
list_startup_items	LaunchAgents/LaunchDaemons on disk + live launchctl state
list_services	Every job launchctl print currently knows about
list_connections	Per-process open sockets, with loopback/LAN/internet exposure
list_installed_apps	/Applications scan: name, version, publisher, size
list_history_series	Which (domain, key) time series this Mac has recorded
query_history	24h/7d history for one (domain, key) pair
list_alert_rules	The GUI app's configured alert rules (not fired-alert history)
get_disk_health	S.M.A.R.T. status per physical disk (Verified / Failing / Not Supported)
get_usb_ports	USB-C/MagSafe ports: live power, cable e-marker identity, negotiated link speed, port health, device tree

list_history_series/query_history read the same ~/Library/Application Support/IDOTaskMaster/History.sqlite file the GUI app's own history recorder writes to (they only query it — never .start() a second recorder against it), so they return real data only once the GUI app has run at least once. Likewise list_alert_rules reads the GUI app's own UserDefaults-persisted rules.

Where the server lives

The server ships inside the app at IDOTaskMaster.app/Contents/Helpers/IDOTaskMasterMCP, so every DMG, PKG and zip release includes it — nothing to build separately.

Registering with an assistant

Open Settings ▸ Integrations. It shows, for Claude Code and OpenCode, whether the server is registered, which config file that lives in, and a one-click Register / Update / Remove. Under the hood:

• Claude Code — runs claude mcp add -s user idotaskmaster -- <path> (user scope, so it works from every project).
• OpenCode — adds an mcp.idotaskmaster entry to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.jsonc (or opencode.json). The file is edited as text, so comments, key order and every other value stay exactly as they were, and the original is copied once to <config>.idotaskmaster.bak before the first change.

With Keep registrations up to date on (the default), launching the app from /Applications repoints a registration you already made if the app was updated or moved. It never creates a registration you didn't ask for.

For other MCP clients, point them at the helper by hand:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "idotaskmaster": {
      "command": "/Applications/IDOTaskMaster.app/Contents/Helpers/IDOTaskMasterMCP"
    }
  }
}

Building from source

scripts/build-mcp.sh            # standalone Debug build
scripts/build-mcp.sh Release

Building the app target (scripts/build.sh) also builds and embeds the helper.

Support

IDOTaskMaster is free, open source, and will stay that way — no license keys, no paywalled pages, no ads. If it's saved you a trip to Activity Monitor often enough to be worth a coffee, a small contribution goes a long way toward keeping it built and maintained:

Not able to contribute? Starring the repo, filing an issue, or just telling another Mac user about it helps just as much. Thank you either way. 🙏

Questions, feedback, or anything else — reach me at galih.lasahido@gmail.com.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.