Building a Native macOS Menu Bar Widget with SwiftUI and Glassmorphism

I recently open-sourced SysMonitor, a native macOS menu bar app for tracking system resources like CPU, RAM, Disk I/O, and Network speeds.

I built it because I was tired of the two extremes in the macOS monitoring ecosystem: tools that give you just a tiny text readout in the menu bar with no details, or massive

dashboards that look like an airplane cockpit. I wanted a clean menu bar readout that drops down into a gorgeous, translucent widget only when I need it.

Here's how I put it together using 100% Swift and SwiftUI, and the workarounds I used to make it feel truly native.

Ditching NSPopover for Custom Glassmorphism