A second ✦ in the menu bar
that pulses when new blocks land.

• menu bar

  ✦ in the status bar

  A single glyph. Grows an ember "new" count when fresh blocks land.

• polling

  Quiet, on a cadence

  Hits /sparrow/api/latest.json every 5 minutes by default (30 s floor, 1 h ceiling).

• notifications

  One per block · digest beyond three

  Notification Center alerts for arrivals; a single digest when more than three land at once.

• preferences

  Endpoint, interval, notifications

  A small AppKit panel — no onboarding flow, no account. Point it at a fork or local dev if you want.

• privacy

  One URL, no telemetry

  Sparrow.app opens exactly one network connection: the feed URL you chose. Nothing else leaves the device.

• footprint

  No dock icon, no cmd-tab

  LSUIElement = true. Lives in the menu bar and the menu bar only.

1. one

   Clone or download the source

   github.com/mhoydich/sparrow-app — self-contained Swift package, no external dependencies.

2. two

   Build with Xcode or SPM

   open Package.swift for a proper bundled .app (recommended), or swift run SparrowApp for a quick menu-bar-visible test from the terminal.

3. three

   Grant notification permission

   On first run macOS asks once. Decline safely — the app still works, it just stops posting alerts.

4. four

   Open Preferences if you want

   ⌘, from the menu. Feed URL defaults to https://pointcast.xyz/sparrow/api/latest.json; change it if you're running a fork.

cd sparrow-app
open Package.swift       # Xcode — recommended, signs + bundles
# or
swift run SparrowApp     # terminal — live menu-bar item, no bundle

Tiny package — one executable target, one Resources/Info.plist, about 500 lines of Swift split across seven files. Reads in one sitting. Source: mhoydich/sparrow-app.

The endpoint at /sparrow/api/latest.json is a polling-shaped companion to the Atom feed: snake_case keys, summary-only fields, last 24 blocks, cache-friendly. The native app decodes it directly into the same Block struct the menu bar renders.

{
  "total": 186,
  "updated_at": "2026-04-21T...",
  "window": 24,
  "origin": "https://pointcast.xyz",
  "blocks": [
    {
      "id": "0362",
      "title": "AgarChat — instant messenger meets agar.io",
      "dek": "...",
      "channel": "FD",
      "type": "LINK",
      "mood": null,
      "timestamp": "2026-04-21T12:00:00-08:00",
      "author": "mh+cc",
      "url": "/b/0362",
      "sparrow_url": "/sparrow/b/0362"
    }
  ]
}