The problem
Built-in battery warnings come as one fixed low-battery alert. People who care about battery health want named thresholds in both directions, tied to whether the Mac is plugged in, without a background process that itself drains power.
DevWizard productmacOS 14+Utilities
VoltGuard
A macOS menu-bar utility that watches your battery and warns you with rules you define, with near-zero idle cost.
- Latest release
- v0.1.1017 Sept 2026
- Language
- Swift
- License
- MIT
- Last updated
- 17 Sept 2026
What we built
What we built
VoltGuard is a menu-bar app with a rule engine for battery alerts.
- Unlimited named rules, each with a level, direction, power condition, channels, message and repeat interval.
- Charging-aware logic, so a 20% warning only fires on battery and an 80% warning only fires while plugged in.
- Four alert channels per rule: notification, sound, spoken voice and dialog.
- Latching alerts that release only after the level clears a margin, so there is no alert spam.
- Schedules for working hours, overnight windows and chosen weekdays.
- History and statistics with daily and weekly aggregates, a charging-session log and CSV, JSON and TXT export.
- VoiceOver labels, full keyboard navigation and icon shapes that never rely on colour alone.
How it was built
Idle cost stays near zero because the app subscribes to IOKit power events instead of polling pmset on a timer. The only network request it makes is the update check, and the project documents the first-launch Gatekeeper steps because the build is signed but not yet notarized.
Links
Source and releases: DevWizardHQ/VoltGuard. Documentation: devwizardhq.github.io/VoltGuard.
Stack
- Swift
- IOKit
- macOS 14+
Outcome
Versioned releases on GitHub, with public documentation.
Services behind this work
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