I keep hitting the "something's using port 3000" thing constantly with side projects running in parallel, and I used to just run lsof -i and squint at PIDs to figure out what was safe to kill. Port Radar sits in the menu bar and just tells you in plain English, which process, spun up by which app, and whether it's actually safe to stop. The on-device explanation is the part that matters most to me since I didn't want yet another background process phoning home about what I'm running locally.
Port Radar for macOS
@juansebsol Great Launch Sebastian!
What made "is this safe to stop" the feature to nail, over just listing ports?
Port Radar for macOS
@yashekbote Thanks Yash! I wanted it to be more than another port viewer. The real value for me was having something intelligent looking at everything running on my ports, understanding what each process actually is, why it’s there, and whether it’s safe to stop.
Got a malware block on my side bro, did you get this approved by apple yet?
looks very useful especially sharing my localhost works
Dial
the "never leaves your machine" part is what would sell me over just running lsof myself. one question on that - Apple Intelligence needs an M-series chip and a fairly recent macOS version to actually run on-device, so what happens on an older Intel Mac or a machine that isn't Apple Intelligence eligible? does it fall back to some simpler heuristic/lookup for the "what is this" explanation, or is that whole feature gated off entirely on unsupported hardware
Port Radar for macOS
@galdayan Good question. On unsupported Macs, the core port/process monitoring still works exactly the same and stays fully local. The Apple Intelligence-powered explanations are only available on supported Apple Silicon Macs, so on older Intel Macs that specific feature is gated off rather than silently sending anything to a cloud model.
I wanted “never leaves your machine” to be a hard rule, not something that changes depending on your hardware. I’m looking at adding a local heuristic process lookup fallback for unsupported Macs though, so they can still get useful context without sacrificing that.
Dial
@juansebsol that's the right call, a feature that quietly phones out on some machines but not others would be way worse than just not having it. glad it's staying a hard rule. good luck with the heuristic fallback, that seems like the harder engineering problem of the two