FamReynaBrain/projects/macos-notification-watcher-poc.md

macOS Notification Watcher POC

Status

POC implementation is built but not yet authorized to read Notification Center. Resume after granting Full Disk Access.

Artifacts

• Project: ~/notification-poc
• Binary: ~/notification-poc/notification-poc
• Source: ~/notification-poc/Sources/NotificationPOC/main.swift
• Log: ~/notification-poc/notifications.jsonl
• State: ~/notification-poc/state.json
• LaunchAgent: ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.adolforeyna.notification-poc.plist
• README: ~/notification-poc/README.md

Behavior

The watcher monitors ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.usernoted/db2/db, primarily via db-wal filesystem events with a two-second fallback scan. It copies db, db-wal, and db-shm to a temporary directory before read-only SQLite access, baselines existing records on first successful run, and logs only later notifications as JSONL. It does not modify, dismiss, forward, or send notifications.

Verification so far

• Swift release build passed.
• plutil -lint passed for the LaunchAgent.
• Runtime reached the expected TCC boundary: macOS returned permission denied for the database.
• Persistent LaunchAgent bootstrap was not run because Hermes blocks registering persistent jobs from inside the gateway process.

Resume steps

1. In System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access, add/enable ~/notification-poc/notification-poc.
2. Run the binary manually and verify it prints Watching and creates/updates notifications.jsonl.
3. Generate a harmless test notification and confirm one JSONL record.
4. Install from a separate shell with: launchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.adolforeyna.notification-poc.plist.
5. Verify with launchctl print gui/$(id -u)/com.adolforeyna.notification-poc and inspect watcher stderr/stdout logs.