costroid-bar

The Costroid taskbar — an always-on tray glance plus a small live cockpit window for what your AI coding tools cost and how close you are to your subscription limits. It is a pure consumer of costroid-core: every figure it shows the engine already computes, from local data, with no extra network call and no telemetry.

Status: Step 6 complete — release-ready at v0.6.0 (T18→T21 built). The tray glance (the C⠉ dot-grid of your most-constrained quota meter), the toggle window, and the background refresh loop are up (T18); the window shows the Overview — the period-spend header + the painted dot/braille quota meters (T19) — plus the tab strip, the opt-in alert banner, and the four live panels: Budget, Forecast, Anomalies, Providers (T20). T21 turned AccessKit on (a screen reader announces each painted meter, alert, and tab), documented the cross-platform matrix below, extended the offline/forbidden-crates/deny guarantees to this binary, and wired the cargo-dist release. The actual v0.6.0 tag + publish is the maintainer's manual cut.

Scope — "glance + live cockpit"

The taskbar's value over the terminal UI is the always-on glance and live status, not deep analysis. So it ships:

• a tray icon — the most-constrained quota meter at a glance, in the 9-step dot-density warning language (non-color-safe by construction), with a full tooltip;
• an Overview header — this-period spend, every quota meter, the alert banner;
• four live panels — Budget, Forecast, Anomalies, Providers.

Trends, Models, History, and Frontier stay in the terminal app (costroid) — they are cramped in a small tray window, and the TUI serves them well. Run costroid for those.

Connections (display-only)

Built with --features connect, the Providers panel displays read-only connection state. Connecting, disconnecting, and reconciling stay in the CLI (costroid connect …), so the taskbar introduces no new credential or network surface. The default build links no network or keychain crate.

Platforms

The taskbar uses a toggle window (not a popover) plus a native tray; the window is the robust core and the tray is a best-effort glance that degrades to window-only wherever it cannot be created (no crash). The honest support matrix:

Degradation is deliberate and tested: if gtk::init() or the tray build fails (Linux), or the tray cannot be created (macOS/Windows), costroid-bar logs a one-line note to stderr and runs window-only — never a crash (src/tray.rs).

Linux interaction note: AppIndicator left-click-to-toggle is unreliable across environments, so the right-click menu's "Open Costroid" is the canonical way to show the window on Linux (left-click toggle works where the SNI host forwards activation, e.g. KDE).

Accessibility: AccessKit is on — Linux AT-SPI (accesskit_unix), macOS NSAccessibility, and Windows UI Automation. The painted widgets (the quota meters, the alert badges, the tray mark, the refresh button, the forecast sparkline) carry accessible names, so a screen reader announces each; the never-color-alone dot-density cue holds throughout. The Linux AT-SPI backend speaks local D-Bus (AF_UNIX) only — never network (proven by scripts/offline_acceptance.sh + the per-binary static allowlist in apps/cli/tests/offline.rs).

Release shape (v0.6.0): because the macOS/Windows tray paths are unverified, costroid-bar ships as downloadable binary archives + cargo install costroid-bar (crates.io). The one-click npm/Homebrew installers stay CLI-only (costroid) until the desktop matrix is field-verified; the GUI joins them in a later 0.6.x once macOS/Windows are confirmed.

Fonts

Bundles JetBrains Mono Regular v2.304 (OFL-1.1; assets/JetBrainsMono-Regular.ttf, license in assets/JetBrainsMono-LICENSE.txt) so the chrome needs no system font. OFL-1.1 is a permissive, non-copyleft font license — fine to bundle in Costroid's Apache-2.0 binaries.