Smartii for Mac

AI in your menu bar. Press a global hotkey anywhere → screenshot your screen → get the answer from your chosen AI provider, shown in a floating panel and copied to your clipboard.

Smartii for Mac is a native macOS menu-bar assistant written in AppKit — the desktop sibling of the Smartii browser extension. It lives in the menu bar (no Dock icon), reaches across every app on your screen, and talks directly to the AI provider of your choice with your own API key. No backend, no telemetry, no account.

⬇ Download the latest release · Website · Browser extension

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What it is

Hit a key in any app. Smartii captures your main display with ScreenCaptureKit, sends the image (or just your typed question) to a vision-capable model, and shows the answer in a floating panel — already copied to your clipboard so you can paste it anywhere. Then it gets out of the way.

• Menu bar, not a window. Runs as an accessory app (LSUIElement) — a ✦ in your menu bar is the whole UI. No Dock icon, no app-switcher clutter.
• Sees your whole screen. Not just a browser tab — any app, any window, the entire desktop.
• Your key, your data. API keys are stored in the macOS Keychain and sent straight to the provider you picked. Nothing routes through a Smartii server.
• 7 providers in one. Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, Hugging Face, Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity. Vision routing automatically picks an image-capable model when a screenshot is attached.
• Global hotkeys. Carbon-registered shortcuts work system-wide, from inside any frontmost app.
• ⚡ Godmode. One press reads everything on screen and answers it all — quizzes, code, errors, multiple-choice — numbered, with the reasoning and the fix.

How it differs from the browser extension

	Smartii for Mac	Smartii (browser extension)
Platform	Native macOS app (AppKit)	Chrome / Edge / Brave / Arc / any Chromium
Where it lives	Menu bar — system-wide	A bar at the bottom of the active page
What it can see	Your entire screen, every app	Only the visible web page
Screenshot engine	ScreenCaptureKit (needs Screen Recording)	chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab
Key storage	macOS Keychain	Browser encrypted sync storage
Summon hotkey	⌘⇧S	Ctrl⇧S
Distribution	Unsigned .app from GitHub Releases	Load-unpacked / packaged extension

Same idea, same providers, same Godmode prompt — just unshackled from the browser.

Hotkeys

All shortcuts are global: they fire from inside whatever app is frontmost.

Shortcut	Action	What it does
⌘⇧S	Summon / Ask	Toggle the floating panel. Type a question and Send, or Solve to attach a screenshot.
⌥⇧S	Solve screen	Instantly screenshot the main display and ask the model what's on it.
⌥⇧G	Godmode	Read the entire screen and answer every question, problem and error — automatically, no typing.
⌥⇧X	Panic	Hide the panel instantly. One keystroke and the screen is yours again.

Install (prebuilt)

1. Download Smartii.dmg from GitHub Releases and open it.
2. Drag Smartii into the Applications folder in the window that appears.
3. Right-click Smartii.app in /Applications → Open the first time. The app is unsigned, so macOS asks you to confirm — click Open. (See Permissions if Gatekeeper blocks it outright.)
4. Grant Screen Recording permission when prompted, then pick a provider and paste your API key from the menu-bar Settings.

After that first launch, Smartii keeps itself up to date — it checks GitHub Releases and downloads new versions automatically, so you only have to do this once.

Prefer a zip? A Smartii-mac.zip is attached to every release as an alternative. Unzip it, move Smartii.app into /Applications, then right-click → Open the first time (same as step 3). This is the same archive the in-app updater uses.

Build from source

Requires Xcode 16 / Swift 6.x toolchain and macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. There are no third-party dependencies — only system frameworks (Cocoa/AppKit, Carbon.HIToolbox, ScreenCaptureKit, Security, CoreGraphics, UniformTypeIdentifiers).

# 1. Compile the Swift Package Manager executable
swift build -c release

# 2. Wrap the binary into a proper Smartii.app bundle
#    (sets LSUIElement, the Info.plist, icon, and usage descriptions)
bash Scripts/make-app.sh

# 3. Launch it
open build/Smartii.app

Scripts/make-app.sh packages the compiled Smartii binary into build/Smartii.app with an Info.plist that marks the app as a menu-bar accessory (LSUIElement = true) and declares the Screen Recording usage description. The first launch will ask for Screen Recording permission.

Running swift run directly works for a quick test, but you'll want the .app bundle for a real menu-bar experience and for the system permission prompts to attribute correctly.

Permissions

Smartii needs two things from macOS:

• Screen Recording. Required for the screenshot/Solve/Godmode features (ScreenCaptureKit captures your display). On first capture, macOS prompts you; if you miss it, enable it manually under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen Recording, then relaunch Smartii.

• Gatekeeper (unsigned app). The release builds are not notarized. The simplest path is right-click the app → Open on first launch. If macOS still refuses ("Smartii is damaged" / "can't be opened"), clear the quarantine attribute:

  xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Smartii.app

Providers & API keys

Smartii is bring-your-own-key. Open the menu-bar Settings window, choose a provider, paste your key (it goes into the Keychain), and optionally pick a model. Switch providers any time from the menu.

Provider	Tier	Default model	Vision	Get a key
Gemini	free	gemini-2.0-flash	✅	https://aistudio.google.com/app/apikey
Groq	free	llama-3.3-70b-versatile	✅*	https://console.groq.com/keys
OpenRouter	mixed	meta-llama/llama-3.3-70b-instruct:free	✅*	https://openrouter.ai/keys
Hugging Face	free	meta-llama/Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct	❌	https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens
Anthropic	paid	claude-sonnet-4-6	✅	https://console.anthropic.com/settings/keys
OpenAI	paid	gpt-4o	✅	https://platform.openai.com/api-keys
Perplexity	paid	sonar	❌	https://www.perplexity.ai/settings/api

* When a screenshot is attached, Smartii automatically routes to a vision-capable model (e.g. Groq's llama-4-scout, OpenRouter's gemini-2.0-flash-exp:free). Perplexity and Hugging Face can't read images — switch to Gemini or Groq for Solve/Godmode.

Keys never leave your machine except in the request to the provider you selected. Smartii has no server of its own.

How Godmode works

When you press ⌥⇧G, Smartii screenshots your screen and sends it with a single instruction:

GODMODE: read the entire attached screenshot of the user's screen. Identify the most important question, problem, code, error, or task on screen and answer it directly and completely. If there are multiple questions, answer all of them, numbered. If it's a multiple-choice question, give the correct letter AND the reasoning. If it's code or an error, show the fix. Be precise. No filler.

The answer lands in the floating panel and on your clipboard.

Privacy

• No analytics, no tracking, no accounts.
• API keys live in the macOS Keychain (service app.smartii.mac).
• Screenshots are sent only to the provider you chose, only when you trigger a capture, and are not stored or logged by Smartii.

License

MIT © platret. Use it, fork it, ship it.