Today we’re launching a new Mac app called Quests for tracking issues and pull requests in your menu bar. Here’s how it came to be.

At Steamclock, we work on a variety of projects at once. Between client projects, open source libraries, and internal labs projects – across iOS, Android, Mac, and the web – we have quite a few repositories and issue trackers going around.

We’re also fans of code review. That means team members sometimes review pull requests for projects that they’re not otherwise working on. Code review is a great way to improve quality and reduce the “bus factor” of projects, but it definitely creates more pull requests and issue traffic.

As a result, our pull request and issue notification emails can get rather noisy. Each of us works across multiple repositories, and often even multiple issue trackers or source control systems. At a certain volume, issues or pull requests can get lost in the shuffle, which can really sap a team’s velocity.

So, we thought it’d be nice if you could easily see the pull requests and issues assigned to you. Maybe right up there in your Mac’s menu bar. So we built that, and turns out: it is nice. We called this little app Quests.

At Steamclock we love to iterate, refine, polish, and add to a product until it’s beautiful and exceptional. With Quests, we challenged ourselves instead to ship it, and then polish it to its full potential beauty.

So we have plans for how we’d like Quests to look, and future subscription features that would let us add additional source control and issue tracking systems beyond GitHub.com and GitLab.com. But today, Quests is useful. Almost everybody at Steamclock uses it already.

So today, Quests is available for free on the Mac App Store. If you think it could be useful to you, try it out. If it is useful to you, let us know!