Scriba is a macOS app you launch once and then mostly forget about — until you need to record. That is intentional. We chose a menu bar presence with Accessory activation policy instead of a Dock icon and a permanent window slot. The product is a capture layer, not another document editor fighting for pixels.
Accessory, not Regular
On startup Scriba sets NSApplication activation policy to Accessory. The app does not appear in the Dock. It does not show up in Cmd+Tab. Your mental model stays "I'm in Zoom / Slack / Xcode" — Scriba is overhead, like AirPods battery or VPN status. When you need the dashboard, you click the tray icon or use a global shortcut; the single main window opens, restores its saved size, and goes away when you close it — hidden, not destroyed.
- Tray icon — always one click away; customizable from Settings.
- Global shortcuts — start/stop recording without hunting the window.
- Window state persists via tauri-plugin-window-state across restarts.
- Ghost mode — hide from screen shares while capture continues (see our ghost mode deep dive).
Why not a Dock app?
Dock apps signal "I am a destination." Word, Figma, Mail — you switch to them and stay. Meeting capture is episodic. You open Scriba for thirty seconds to hit Record, then return to the call. A Dock tile becomes clutter; users minimize and never find it again. Menu bar utilities match the cadence: present, unobtrusive, fast.
We are not building a meeting bot that joins your calendar and occupies a tile. Scriba runs on your Mac, locally, while you run the meeting in whatever tool you already use.
Single-window simplicity
One Tauri window — main — hosts the dashboard, settings, and meeting view. Tab navigation inside the window covers home, active meetings, and new-meeting flows. We cap concurrent new-meeting tabs at two so resource usage stays predictable. No multi-window sync problems, no "which window is recording?" panic.
Tradeoffs we accept
Menu bar apps are invisible to users who expect a Dock bounce on launch. We mitigate with first-run onboarding, tray icon choice, and clear permission prompts. Power users get ghost mode and shortcut-driven workflows; casual users get a normal window when they click the icon. The architecture trades discoverability in the Dock for permanence in the menu bar — the right swap for software that should be running before the meeting starts, not during slide three of a deck.