Vitals
A Mac activity monitor that thinks in apps, not processes
Details
- External ID
- 49844804
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Vitals
- Website domain
- vitalsmac.com
- Launched
- Sept. 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 6
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.32854864433811803
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 29, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 29, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- macOS and desktop customization tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Observability & eval
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- mac activity monitor organized by apps
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the desktop dashboard UI is straightforward, mapping every child process, daemon, and helper XPC service to its parent application bundle with low overhead requires low-level macOS systems programming.
What it would actually take: Requires a native Swift or Objective-C application interfacing directly with Darwin kernel APIs (`sysctl`, `proc_pidinfo`, `IOKit`, and Mach APIs). The difficult component is accurately resolving dynamic process parentage, matching arbitrary background helpers and helper tools to registered bundle identifiers, and polling these statistics continuously with sub-1% CPU impact and minimal memory overhead.
Discussion
7 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Activity Monitor
Feature requests: Roll helper processes under the parent app
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 786 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #527 of 787 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 329 days after the earliest competitor.
- Kipless · github · 2026-09-11 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.65
- timebar · github · 2026-09-22 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- ratio · github · 2026-09-13 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- Kadō · hn · 2026-08-16 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- emu · github · 2026-09-25 · 34 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Vitals · ph · 2026-09-28 · 294 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- noterepo · github · 2026-09-29 · 36 upvotes · similarity 0.59
- Kadō · hn · 2026-05-03 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.58
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.