Why I'm Building a Native Mac Command Center for Developers (And Why You Should Care)

#buildinpublic #swiftui #macos #indiehackers

Why I'm Building a Native Mac Command Center for Developers (And Why You Should Care)

I've been shipping SaaS products as a solo founder for the past few years. My daily workflow looked like this:

Tab 1: GitHub — check PRs, review code, merge conflicts
Tab 2: Stripe — did anyone pay today? Any chargebacks?
Tab 3: Vercel — is the site down? Why is the build failing?
Tab 4: Sentry — what broke overnight?
Tab 5: Linear — what am I supposed to be working on?
Tab 6–15: Slack, Notion, PostHog, Railway, Firebase, Supabase, Render... you get the idea.

Every morning, I'd open 15+ browser tabs just to answer three questions:

What's broken?
What needs my attention right now?
Is the business still running?

Context-switching hell. And I got tired of it.

So I built Navique — a native macOS command center for developers who are sick of managing their entire stack across 15 browser tabs.

What Is Navique?

It's a native Mac app (SwiftUI, not Electron, not a web wrapper) that consolidates everything you need to run your dev projects:

GitHub: PRs, code reviews, branch status, multi-repo view
Revenue: Stripe MRR, new customers, churn
Deployments: Vercel, Railway, Render, Netlify — all in one place
Errors: Sentry alerts and trends
Analytics: PostHog, Firebase
Project management: Kanban board synced with GitHub issues
AI agents: Local orchestration via bundled Eggspert engine (supports Ollama + 20 cloud LLM providers)

52+ customizable dashboard cards. 14+ integrations. One app.

And here's the kicker: it runs 100% locally. Your GitHub tokens, Stripe keys, and project data never leave your Mac unless you choose a cloud LLM for the AI features.

Why Native Mac? (And Why I Didn't Just Build a Web Dashboard)

I tried every web dashboard. They all felt... off.

Slow to load
Janky animations
No offline mode
Generic design (Bootstrap vibes)
Took 3 seconds just to check if the site was down

I wanted something that felt like a real Mac app:

Glass morphism UI that matches macOS 15
Keyboard shortcuts everywhere (Cmd+K command palette, obviously)
Menubar integration
Offline-capable (local SQLite database)
Fast — opens in under 1 second, dashboard renders instantly

Plus, I like building with Swift. SwiftUI is genuinely great once you get past the learning curve.

The AI agent engine (Eggspert) is built in Rust because I needed async actors and didn't want to deal with Swift concurrency for that part. Rust + tokio gave me a 30 MB binary that handles parallel agent dispatch, tool calling, and streaming responses without breaking a sweat.

The Tech Stack

Main app:

Swift 6.0 + SwiftUI
macOS 15.0+ (Apple Silicon + Intel)
SQLite for local data
WebSocket connections to integrations

Eggspert engine (bundled):

Rust (tokio async runtime)
14-module actor architecture
REST/SSE/WebSocket API on localhost:4200
Supports Ollama (local) + Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, DeepSeek, and 15 more cloud providers

Why this matters: You can run the entire stack offline if you use Ollama. No cloud dependency except for the integrations you choose to connect.

Who Is This For?

Navique is for:

✅ Indie developers shipping SaaS products
✅ Solo founders managing GitHub + Stripe + deployments
✅ Small engineering teams (2–8 people)
✅ Freelance devs juggling multiple client projects
✅ Anyone who knows what an MCP server is and gets excited about it

Navique is NOT for:

❌ Non-technical users looking for a pretty todo list
❌ Enterprise teams with 50+ developers (it's built for small, fast-moving teams)
❌ Windows or Linux users (macOS only, no cross-platform plans)

Why I'm Building This in Public

I'm bootstrapped. No VC funding. No co-founder. Just me, a MacBook Pro, and a lot of coffee.

I'm documenting the entire journey — the technical decisions, the design choices, what worked, what failed, and what I'm learning along the way.

Over the next month, I'll be posting every other day about:

How I built specific features (GitHub integration, AI code review, dashboard cards)
Design decisions (why glass morphism, why keyboard-first)
Integration challenges (dealing with GitHub's API, Stripe webhooks, deployment APIs)
Beta feedback (what testers love, what they hate)
Pricing psychology (why perpetual license instead of subscription)
Launch prep (influencer outreach, Product Hunt strategy)

Why? Because I learn by teaching. And if I'm being honest, I need the accountability. Building solo is lonely — posting publicly keeps me shipping.

Current Status: Beta Recruiting

The core is working. I use it daily for my own projects. Still shipping features and iterating based on feedback. Now I need validation that it's useful to someone other than me.

I'm looking for 10–15 beta testers who:

Actively ship software (SaaS, mobile apps, web apps)
Use macOS as their daily driver
Manage GitHub repos + at least 2–3 other tools (Stripe, deployments, analytics, etc.)
Are willing to share honest feedback (good and bad)

What you get:

Free beta access (no credit card)
Founding user pricing when we launch ($99 instead of $149)
Early access to all features before public launch
Direct line to me via Discord for feedback/bugs

If you're interested: DM me on Twitter @HatchingEggbert or comment below with what tools you currently juggle daily.

What's Next

Over the next 4 weeks:

Week 1: Beta recruitment, onboarding first testers
Week 2: Ship features based on beta feedback
Week 3: Influencer outreach (Founding Creator program)
Week 4: Launch prep (Product Hunt, press kit, landing page)

I'll be posting updates every other day. Follow along if you're curious about building native macOS apps, shipping solo, or just want to see if I can actually pull this off.

Next post: How I built the GitHub integration (and why GitHub's API is both amazing and frustrating).

Follow the journey: