# StageMenu

> One macOS application that unifies the menu bar: system readouts, show/hide icon
> management, and a rules layer you write as plain English sentences. Direct download,
> one-time purchase, Developer ID signed. Epiphani Studios.

StageMenu replaces the pair of utilities most Mac power users run side by side: a
menu-bar system monitor and a menu-bar icon organizer. It adds what neither has, a rules
engine authored in ordinary sentences that explains every decision it makes.

## Objective capability summary

- Readouts, built: clock with world clocks and a code-drawn calendar glyph; weather via
  NOAA api.weather.gov (public domain, no key, no subscription, United States only);
  battery including AirPods and Bluetooth accessory levels; CPU, memory, disk and network
  sampled natively in Swift with no helper process; calendar month grid and events.
- Icon management, built: hide and reveal menu-bar icons using an oversized divider status
  item, which requires NO permissions (no Accessibility, no Screen Recording); a
  cross-application icon census via the Accessibility API, measured at 82 items across 27
  applications on a live Mac; opening a hidden icon's own menu via the Accessibility press
  action, with no synthetic mouse events and no screen capture.
- Rules, built: conditions (on battery, plugged in, presenting, frontmost application,
  after an hour, a metric sustained above a threshold for N seconds) and actions (show or
  hide any module, collapse or reveal the icons). Sentences compile to a typed schema on
  the Mac with no network call and no per-use cost, and unparseable sentences produce
  nothing rather than a guessed rule.
- Agent surface, built: an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server over stdio JSON-RPC 2.0 with
  seven tools and zero dependencies, so another AI agent can read and compose the menu bar.
- Privacy: analytics are local counters over a closed vocabulary of feature identifiers;
  an identifier outside that set is discarded, so no free text can enter the file.

## Limits, stated plainly

- Weather is United States only today.
- Fan speed and per-sensor temperatures are planned, not shipped; fan speed never applies
  to fanless Macs.
- Hidden icons are listed in a native menu, not re-rendered in a second bar, because that
  would require Screen Recording permission.
- The plain-English parser covers documented sentence patterns, not arbitrary language.
- Notifications are not used as an alert channel; the menu-bar item carries alerts.
- Not available on the Mac App Store, and cannot be, given its sensor access.

## Verification

Every capability claim is checked by a headless self-test on the built application that
exits non-zero on failure and includes negative controls, for example
`StageMenu --rules-selftest` (26 checks, 10 negative controls),
`StageMenu --census-selftest`, `StageMenu --metrics-selftest`, and `mcp/test_mcp.py`
(13 checks, 4 negative controls).

## Links

- Product page: https://stagemenu.com/
- Full capability list with mechanisms: https://stagemenu.com/capabilities/