I built CoIsland, a native Mac app that brings monitors for tools like GitHub, Jira and Snowflake into one place. You choose what to watch and how often to check it.
The app is written in Swift and SwiftUI, with help from Claude Code.
A concrete example
Suppose you want to watch failed runs from a particular GitHub Actions workflow.
Connect GitHub with the required read permissions, select the repository and workflow, and set a checking interval. With the “New rows appear” rule, the first check establishes a baseline. Later checks alert when a new matching failure appears.
The alert keeps the matching results and activity together. You can inspect it, add notes, acknowledge it and resolve it when you’re done.
How it works underneath
Each monitor is a plain-text watch file. Comment lines contain settings such as the connector, interval and alert rule. The body contains the query.
You can edit these files outside the app and version them in Git. Tokens are stored separately in macOS Keychain.
One important detail for custom queries is row identity. Including a constantly changing timestamp in the comparison can make the same item look new on every check. Choosing a stable key avoids that problem.
Limits worth knowing
Checks are periodic and pause while your Mac sleeps or locks. Critical overnight monitoring still needs an always-on system.
You can also hand an alert’s context to Claude Code, Codex or Cortex Code. This is optional and sends that context through the selected agent and its provider.
CoIsland requires Apple Silicon and macOS 14+. Two monitors run for free; a licence unlocks more.
App and docs: https://coisland.app/
What would you monitor first, and what context would make its alerts useful?
AI helped draft this post.
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