PaceBar
A quiet pace instrument for your Mac
144 followers
A quiet pace instrument for your Mac
144 followers
PaceBar is a private Mac menu-bar app that turns on-device interaction patterns into a simple load readout, helping you notice rising work pace, reduce app switching, and take short resets when a session gets heavy.
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Hey Product Hunt! I'm Charbel, and I built PaceBar because I kept noticing, too late, that I'd been working way too intensely.
A typical session: one task, then Slack, a doc, a few browser tabs, a couple of AI chats, another tab, and suddenly the "focused block" was five things at once. The annoying part was always realizing it after I was already drained.
I didn't want a productivity dashboard or another habit system. I just wanted a small signal in the menu bar that said: your pace is climbing.
So that's PaceBar.
PaceBar is a quiet menu-bar instrument for Mac. It turns local interaction patterns, like activity timing, idle time, focus time, and app changes, into a 0–100 session-load readout that adapts to your working baseline, so you can catch a rising pace before the session gets heavy.
When things are balanced, it stays out of the way. When the session gets heavy, it can nudge you to step away briefly and return to one task. When there's headroom, it can prompt you to protect the next block for the work that matters.
Privacy was a hard constraint from day one: no account, no telemetry, no cloud processing, no privileged access. PaceBar doesn't read your screen, see what you type, or touch your files. Everything stays on your Mac.
It's built for people who spend the day context-switching across code, docs, chats, browsers, design tools, research, and AI tools, and want to notice the pace before it gets away from them. Not to optimize every minute. Just to catch yourself before you overdo it.
I'd love feedback on the core idea: does a quiet menu-bar instrument for session load feel useful in a real workday? I'm especially curious whether the Calm / Steady / High framing reads clearly at a glance, and how subtle the nudges should be.
This looks super interesting.
I wanted to try it out but it's not available in my region, any plans to release it globally? 🙃
@curiousigor Thanks so much! PaceBar is released globally, the holdup is Apple's DSA trader verification, which is required for EU distribution. I'm working through it now and it'll go live in the EU as soon as it's approved. Appreciate your patience!
@ramicharbel got it, thanks! Will keep an eye out on the App Store 😊
Very interesting.
Does it give a bit of a data read of last week, month etc?
@atomicimagery Thanks so much! Not yet, but it’s something I’m working on for the next version.
I’m being pretty deliberate about it because I want PaceBar to stay lightweight and easy to check at a glance. The current version is focused on the live session signal, but I do think a simple local history view for recent patterns would be useful, as long as it stays quiet and everything remains on-device.