Fokly

How it works

1. Tell Fokly what you're working on. Click the ring in the menu bar (or press ⌃⌥Space), type your goal and pick a length. Optionally list what also counts (Slack #team, the docs) and what never does (YouTube, X).
2. Get to work. Every 20 seconds Fokly checks the window in front of you: it reads the app, the window title and the text on screen, and a local AI model decides whether it serves your goal.
3. Fokly reminds you. Get distracted and the menu bar turns amber right away. If it lasts (two minutes by default), a quiet reminder slides in, written about what you're actually doing.
4. One click and you're back. Take me back returns you to the exact window and browser tab you were working in. This is relevant teaches the session that the activity counts. Take a break pauses without guilt.

Private by design

• The model runs on your Mac. Fokly uses Qwen3.5 (4B by default, 2B as a lighter option) through MLX, in-process, on the Apple silicon GPU. The weights are downloaded once from Hugging Face, pinned to an exact commit.
• Nothing leaves your Mac. No account, no cloud, no analytics. Screenshots and screen text are judged in memory and thrown away; only the session history (goal, times, app names) is kept, locally.
• The one request Fokly makes is the daily update check: it reads fokly.app/appcast.xml through Sparkle, with no system profile. Turn it off in Settings → About.
• You can read every line. That's the point of this repository.

Fokly needs two permissions: Screen Recording to see the window you're working in, and Accessibility so Take me back can return you to the right window and tab. The first launch walks you through both.

Install

Download Fokly.dmg, open it and drag Fokly to Applications. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

Fokly updates itself from 1.1 on. Updates are signed with an EdDSA key and verified before they're installed, and a check never interrupts a focus session: a small Update button appears in the popover instead. Coming from 1.0 or 1.0.1? Download it once more; after that it keeps itself up to date.

Requirements: macOS 27, an Apple silicon Mac, about 3 GB of disk for the model (the first session downloads it).

Build from source

You need Xcode 27, XcodeGen and the Metal toolchain.

brew install xcodegen
xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project Fokly.xcodeproj -scheme Fokly -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath build -skipMacroValidation -skipPackagePluginValidation build
open build/Build/Products/Release/Fokly.app

The project signs with the maintainer's team (DEVELOPMENT_TEAM in project.yml). To build your own copy, set your team there, or sign to run locally.

Developer tools

Builds with the DEVTOOLS flag carry extra launch modes for testing and for the website and video assets. Release builds never contain them.

xcodebuild … -derivedDataPath build-dev 'SWIFT_ACTIVE_COMPILATION_CONDITIONS=$(inherited) DEVTOOLS' build
build-dev/Build/Products/Release/Fokly.app/Contents/MacOS/Fokly --bench-acc mlx-community/Qwen3.5-2B-4bit report.md

Flag	What it does
--bench-acc <model> [report]	Judges 38 labeled screens and reports accuracy, missed distractions and false alarms
--bench <model> [report]	The above plus live screen checks, latency and memory
--stress [report]	600 random UI actions, panel churn, a real one-minute session
--tour	The onboarding tour
--shots <dir> · --stills <dir>	Screenshots of the real UI for the website and the launch video

Releasing

scripts/release.sh builds, signs Sparkle's helpers and the app with Developer ID, verifies the hardened runtime, packages the DMG with its install window (scripts/dmg/), notarizes and staples it, then signs it for Sparkle and adds it to the update feed (site/appcast.xml). Set the version in project.yml and write scripts/notes/<version>.html first.

xcrun notarytool store-credentials fokly-notary --apple-id <Apple ID> --team-id <Team ID>   # once
scripts/release.sh
gh release create vX.Y dist/Fokly-X.Y.dmg dist/Fokly.dmg   # Fokly.dmg is what the website links to
git commit site/appcast.xml -m "Fokly X.Y" && git push       # publish the feed only after the release exists

The Sparkle signing key is in the login keychain (account fokly). Export a backup with generate_keys --account fokly -x <file>; without it no further update can be shipped to existing installs.

Project layout

Fokly/
  Core/      FocusController (session state, the observe → judge loop, distractions and reminders)
             ScreenObserver (active window via ScreenCaptureKit, Vision OCR, idle and lock detection)
             FocusJudge (MLX model loading, the prompt, parsing the verdict)
             WindowReturn (Take me back: back to the exact window and tab via Accessibility)
             Updater (Sparkle: daily check, quiet during a session)
             HistoryStore, Models, Theme
  Panels/    Menu bar item and popover, the reminder panel, the floating timer, onboarding, permissions
  Views/     SwiftUI screens: start, active session, insights, settings
  App/       App entry point and the DEVTOOLS-only modes
site/        The website (static, deployed to Vercel) and the update feed
scripts/     release.sh, the DMG window (dmg/), the feed writer (appcast.py), release notes (notes/)
project.yml  XcodeGen project definition

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. If you change how Fokly judges the screen (Core/FocusJudge.swift), please run --bench-acc on both the 4B and 2B models before and after and include the numbers.

License

MIT. Updates use Sparkle (MIT). The Qwen3.5 model weights are not part of this repository; they're downloaded from Hugging Face under their own license (Apache 2.0). Website photos are from Unsplash (Leo_Visions, KC Welch); the Fleet Week footage is by the U.S. Navy.