MenuBarADSB

A small macOS menu bar app that shows aircraft in your area in real time.

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What it does

MenuBarADSB lives in your menu bar and shows the closest (or highest / lowest / fastest) aircraft within a configurable radius around your current location. Click it to see the full list of nearby aircraft — identifier, airline, route, type, altitude, speed, distance, and heading. Clicking an aircraft opens it on Flightradar24 or the adsb.lol globe.

Screenshots

 

Features

• Live tracking within a 1–50 km radius, updating every 5–60 seconds
• Configurable menu bar display — pick which fields appear next to the identifier
• Dropdown list of all nearby aircraft, sorted by distance
• "Featured" selection: closest / highest altitude / lowest altitude / fastest
• Notifications for newly appearing aircraft (optional)
• Launch at login (SMAppService)
• Localization: English & German (follows system language)
• Sandboxed, signed with Hardened Runtime
• Pure SwiftUI, no external dependencies

Data sources

The app fetches data live from two public APIs — nothing is stored locally:

Data	Source
Aircraft positions (ICAO, position, altitude, speed, track)	adsb.lol
Airline name & route (origin/destination IATA) by callsign	adsbdb.com

Big thanks to the maintainers of both projects for offering these for free.

Install

Requirements: macOS 26 or newer.

1. Grab the latest MenuBarADSB-*.zip from the Releases page.
2. Unzip it and move MenuBarADSB.app to /Applications.
3. First launch: the app is unsigned (ad-hoc only — no Apple Developer ID), so macOS Gatekeeper blocks the default double-click. Right-click the app → Open → confirm the dialog. After that it launches normally.
4. macOS will ask for location permission — needed to determine the radius around your position.

Build from source

Requirements:

• macOS 26 or newer
• Xcode 26 or newer

git clone https://github.com/RobinSp5/MacADSBMenuBar.git
cd MacADSBMenuBar
open MenuBarADSB.xcodeproj

Hit Run in Xcode (⌘R). On first launch macOS asks for location permission — needed to determine the radius around your position.

Localization

The app uses String Catalogs (Localizable.xcstrings, InfoPlist.xcstrings) with English as the source language and German as a translation.

• macOS in English → app in English, numbers with a dot (e.g. 1.5 km)
• macOS in German → app in German, numbers with a comma (e.g. 1,5 km)
• Per-app language override via System Settings → General → Language & Region → Applications

To add another language: add the locale to knownRegions in project.pbxproj, add the language in the String Catalog, then provide translations.

Project layout

MenuBarADSB/
├── MenuBarADSBApp.swift        // App entry, scene setup
├── Models/                      // Aircraft, DisplayField, MenuBarSelection, GeoMath
├── Services/                    // ADSBService, RouteService, LocationService,
│                                // NotificationService, LaunchAtLoginService
├── State/                       // AppSettings (UserDefaults), AircraftStore (polling)
├── Views/                       // MenuBarLabelView, MenuBarContentView, SettingsView
├── Localizable.xcstrings        // UI strings EN/DE
└── InfoPlist.xcstrings          // NSLocationUsageDescription EN/DE

Ideas for later

• Watchlist / favourites (highlight callsign patterns)
• Manual location override
• Trend indicator (approaching / receding)
• Aircraft photos via Planespotters
• Inline map in the popover
• Pause / snooze
• Multiple zones (alert radius vs. display radius)

License

No license set yet. Open an issue if you need one.

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Built for personal use. Not affiliated with adsb.lol or adsbdb.com.