Glanceable market data for the macOS menu bar.
Website: www.pulseticker.app
Pulse is a lightweight market-watching app, not a trading terminal. It solves exactly one problem: seeing how the symbols you care about are doing — and whether your positions are up or down — in the shortest possible time, without leaving what you're working on.
| Watchlist | Quote Detail | Record Trade |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
- Menu bar ticker: icon-only by default (discreet); optionally show quotes as a pinned single symbol (
NVDA 188.3 +2.1%) or a carousel rotating through your watchlist - Watchlists supporting US stocks, Hong Kong stocks, China A-shares, Japanese and Korean stocks, cryptocurrencies, precious metals, indices, and ETFs — organize symbols into named lists, pin favorites per list, and reorder them with native drag and drop
- Position tracking: quantity, cost basis, market value, daily P&L, and total P&L
- Quote detail view: price, change, OHLC, volume, amplitude, realtime / delayed status, quote source, and market-specific timestamp in a dense menu-bar layout
- Charts: intraday lines and daily / weekly / monthly candlesticks with OHLC and volume, sourced from the best available provider per market
- Sharing: copy a branded, mobile-friendly image, or export an English structured market snapshot with source, timestamp, session, and chart data for analysis in an LLM
- Multi-provider data layer: providers are routed per market, cached to reduce duplicate requests, and fail over automatically when one is rate-limited or down
- Real-time crypto via Binance: cryptocurrency search, quotes, and charts use Binance Spot public market-data endpoints, with a locally cached 24-hour symbol catalog and 1-second WebSocket ticker updates while the popover is open; Pulse stores crypto as a structured base/quote pair and displays it as
BTC/USDT - Precious metals: nine instruments across both sides of the market — London spot gold and silver, the COMEX / NYMEX contracts (gold, silver, platinum, palladium), the Shanghai Gold Exchange's Au99.99 spot contract, and the SHFE gold and silver futures. The Shanghai instruments price in CNY per gram on a Chinese session with its own night leg; the rest quote in USD per ounce. Spot leads everywhere, because that is what "黄金" and "gold" mean to someone asking the price. Quotes come from Tencent's international channel and Sina, history from Yahoo (COMEX), Sina (London spot, SHFE), the exchange's own daily file (Au99.99) and Eastmoney (Au99.99 intraday) — Yahoo has never carried a working spot symbol and covers no Chinese exchange. Pulse owns the metal catalog, so "黄金" offers all three golds, while "现货黄金" / "黄金期货" / "沪金" name one each; searching "gold", "XAU", "GC" or "贵金属" works too, even though no provider's search index covers the channel
- Real-time via Longbridge: optionally connect your own Longbridge account (browser authorization or API keys) to upgrade HK / US / A-share quotes to official real-time data, streamed live over a push connection — including the US overnight session
- Japan and Korea: Tokyo (Prime, Standard and Growth) plus both Korea Exchange boards, KOSPI and KOSDAQ, with the Nikkei 225 and the KOSPI Composite alongside them. Tokyo's 11:30–12:30 lunch break folds out of the intraday axis the way Hong Kong's and Shanghai's do; Seoul trades straight through. Korea is real time through Naver, which also answers Korean-language search and is authoritative about which board a code belongs to — that matters, because the board is part of the address and cannot be derived from the code (035720 is KOSPI, not KOSDAQ, and Yahoo's
.KQsymbol for it prices something else entirely). Japan is delayed about twenty minutes via Yahoo: its exchange licenses even the fifteen-minute feed, so no free real-time source exists. Japanese stocks are found by their four-character exchange code: Yahoo indexes no Japanese names (任天堂returns nothing) and an English name competes with every ADR and foreign listing of the same company, sonintendoreaches no Tokyo listing at all. Korean stocks are reachable either way — Naver answers삼성전자, Yahoo answerssamsung - Session-aware, per-source refresh: each provider polls at its own configurable cadence, and only while its markets are open — saving power and avoiding rate limits; push-capable sources stream instead of polling
- Language control: follows the system language when possible, with manual switching between English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese
Download the latest Pulse-*.dmg from GitHub Releases, open it, and drag Pulse.app to Applications before launching. The Pulse-*.zip asset is used by Sparkle for automatic updates.
Pulse uses TelemetryDeck to understand basic product usage. Anonymous analytics are enabled by default and can be disabled at any time in Settings → General → Share Anonymous Usage Data. Once disabled, Pulse stops queuing new analytics events.
Pulse currently sends only these product-interaction events:
Pulse.app.launchedPulse.popover.openedPulse.settings.openedPulse.refresh.manualRequestedPulse.settings.analyticsEnabled— sent only when analytics are turned back on
TelemetryDeck's Swift SDK automatically adds basic technical context such as the Pulse version and build, macOS version, device model and architecture, language, locale, region, time zone, display properties, and whether the build is a debug or App Store build. On macOS, the SDK also generates a random pseudonymous device identifier and a session identifier. Pulse does not provide TelemetryDeck with a name, email address, account identifier, or other custom user identifier.
Pulse never adds watched symbols, watchlists, positions, quantities, cost bases, search text,
market-data responses, Longbridge credentials, or other user-provided content to analytics events.
TelemetryDeck's bundled privacy manifest declares product-interaction data and a device identifier
for analytics; the data is not linked to the user's identity and is not used for tracking. Pulse has
no advertising or cross-app tracking. The complete event boundary is intentionally kept in
PulseTelemetry.swift so the implementation can be audited.
Requires Xcode 26+ and XcodeGen. Pulse.xcodeproj is generated from project.yml and is not checked in.
# Generate the Xcode project and build
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Pulse.xcodeproj -scheme PulseMac -configuration Debug build
# Or build, launch, and verify the menu-bar process
./scripts/dev-mac.sh --verifyThe development script uses the first valid Apple Development identity in the builder's local Keychain so macOS recognizes repeated Debug builds as the same app. If no development certificate is available, it falls back to ad-hoc signing. Development certificates and private keys never enter the repository; every contributor signs with their own local identity, and release signing and notarization remain a separate workflow.
For local telemetry testing, supply the TelemetryDeck app identifier as a build setting. An empty or missing value disables analytics for that build:
TELEMETRYDECK_APP_ID="your-app-id" ./scripts/dev-mac.sh --telemetryThe app identifier is embedded in configured builds and is not a secret or an API credential.
Tests live in the PulseCore package:
# Unit tests (includes Binance/Tencent/Yahoo parsing via recorded fixtures)
cd Packages/PulseCore && swift test
# Unit tests plus provider contracts against the live endpoints
PULSE_LIVE_TESTS=1 swift testThe release pipeline lives in scripts/release-mac.sh. It archives, signs,
notarizes, packages, and uploads Pulse together with its Sparkle appcast.
Version-specific GitHub Release copy lives in .github/release-notes/<version>.md.
Both are tracked so a release can be reproduced from the repository.
Packages/PulseCore— pure Swift, no UI: models, data providers, trading calendars, persistence, and the refresh scheduler. Shared across Mac / iOS / widget targets.Packages/PulseUI— shared SwiftUI components: candlestick chart, intraday chart, sparkline, gain/loss colors.PulseMac— the macOS menu bar app (MenuBarExtra,LSUIElement=true).
All market data flows through the QuoteProvider protocol abstraction. A CompositeProvider routes requests per market and candle period, caches recent responses, breaks the circuit on unhealthy providers, and composes data from multiple sources (e.g. realtime crypto from Binance, realtime A-share quotes and intraday lines from Tencent, broad securities coverage from Yahoo (including Tokyo and, as failover, both Korean boards), real-time Korean quotes, Korean-language search and charts from Naver, London spot and SHFE metal data from Sina, official Shanghai Gold Exchange history, and real-time securities streaming from a connected Longbridge account). Index and precious-metal identities are Pulse's own: one semantic identity per instrument, mapped to each source's wire symbol (COMEX gold is hf_GC at Tencent and GC=F at Yahoo), which keeps quotes on the real-time source while history comes from whichever source has it. Crypto identity is stored provider-independently as separate base and quote assets; Binance renders BTCUSDT on the wire while Pulse displays BTC/USDT. Binance is the sole source for cryptocurrency search, quotes, and candles: Pulse never silently substitutes Yahoo's different BTC-USD instrument for BTC/USDT. Binance's current Spot symbol directory is cached on disk for 24 hours and refreshed in the background when stale. Exact crypto base or pair matches remain prominent in cross-market search, while unrelated crypto results follow securities. Binance and Longbridge can stream different markets concurrently. The Longbridge integration is built on the pinned official OpenAPI C SDK, embedded at build time as a bundled plugin, and stores credentials only in the local Keychain.
Quotes carry their active source and source-specific delay metadata through the app. The watchlist footer shows the live feed status, while each symbol detail view shows that symbol's realtime / delayed status, active source, and market timestamp with the relevant time basis.
Out of the box, Pulse uses Binance's public Spot market-data API for cryptocurrency prices, the Shanghai Gold Exchange's own published history, plus free, unofficial quote endpoints from Yahoo Finance, Tencent, Sina, Naver, and Eastmoney for broader coverage. No Binance account or API key is required. These public feeds have no SLA and may be rate-limited, unavailable in some regions, or change over time. Optionally, you can connect your own Longbridge OpenAPI account for official real-time securities quotes delivered by push; quote entitlements follow your account, and credentials never leave the local Keychain. Quote delay varies by provider and market; each source's per-market freshness is spelled out on its detail page. All data is for reference only and is not investment advice.