Two quick updates on the Hotline front. First, Hotline Navigator now has a proper home at hotlinenavigator.com. Previously, if you wanted to find the client you had to dig through GitHub or my personal website. Now there's a landing page with an about, privacy policy, and a link to the source code, making it easier to find and share.

Hotline Navigator is now at 0.1.8 and includes iOS/iPadOS and Android builds for anyone willing to sideload. The last few versions have included some nice tweaks: Large File support, Inline Image Previews, a proper error modal system, extended icon support, get info, hotline url support, live username updates, TLS support, and ton of UI/UX improvements for all screen sizes. It might be the most feature rich Hotline client on the planet. Markdown support is coming in the next version.

Hotline Navigator banner

MobiusAdmin: a macOS GUI for Mobius

The bigger news is MobiusAdmin, a native macOS app I built that wraps the Mobius Hotline server in a point-and-click interface. To be clear, I didn't write Mobius itself. Mobius is a modern, cross-platform Hotline server written in Go that's compatible with all the popular Hotline clients. What I did write is a SwiftUI front-end that lets you run and manage the whole thing without ever touching a terminal or hand-editing config files.

If you've ever wanted to spin up a Hotline server on your Mac but didn't want to wrestle with YAML and command-line flags, this is for you. MobiusAdmin includes:

  • A setup wizard that walks you through initial configuration.
  • One-click start, stop, and restart.
  • A visual account editor with toggles for all 35 Hotline permission flags, because nobody wants to memorize access bitmasks.
  • A file browser for the server's shared directory.
  • News and message board management.
  • A live log viewer with real-time user monitoring.
  • Ban management.
  • Server settings (name, description, banner, tracker registration, port) without needing a restart.

It ships as a universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel, fully signed and notarized. The whole thing is around 55 MB and uses minimal RAM since you're basically running a Go binary with a thin SwiftUI shell on top.

One caveat: it requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later due to some SwiftUI APIs I leaned on. In theory you could back-port it to earlier versions, but I didn't want to maintain compatibility shims for older OS releases.

The source is on GitHub and it's free and open source, same as everything else in this little ecosystem. If you're running a Hotline server or thinking about it, give it a shot. And if you just want to connect to one, hotlinenavigator.com has you covered.