The desktop app
ORBIS is a native macOS app that runs as a menu-bar agent — always available, out of your way. This page covers how the app behaves on your Mac.
Menu-bar agent
ORBIS lives in the menu bar, not the dock. The protoLabs robot icon up top is your handle to it:
- Left-click the icon → show the orb window.
- The icon's menu → Show ORBIS / Quit ORBIS.
There's intentionally no dock icon — ORBIS is a background companion, like a menu-bar utility.
Closing vs. quitting
- Close the window (the red traffic-light, or ⌘W) → the window hides. ORBIS keeps running: the voice loop, your sidecar, and audio stay alive, so it keeps listening in the background. Bring it back from the menu-bar icon.
- Quit (menu-bar icon → Quit ORBIS) → fully exits and shuts the sidecar down cleanly. This is the real "stop ORBIS."
The window
When it's visible, the orb fills the window edge-to-edge (an immersive title bar — the orb runs to the top). The chrome is minimal:
- Top-right gear → Settings.
- Reminders bell (below the gear) → your scheduled reminders; a dot, tinted to the orb's colour, appears when any are set.
- Double-click the orb → start a voice turn.
Under the hood
The app is a thin native shell plus a local sidecar (the brain + voice pipeline) that it launches and supervises. Everything runs on 127.0.0.1; nothing is exposed to the network. If something feels stuck, the cleanest reset is Quit from the menu bar and relaunch.
Installing
Download the signed, notarized .dmg from orbis.protolabs.studio/download and drag ORBIS into Applications — see Getting started.