Poch

A tiny notch for the top of your Windows screen. Music, clock, water, to-do, file shelf and notes, all in one place.

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About

Poch sits flush against the top edge of your screen as a small black notch. Hover over it and it expands into a carousel of mini apps. Move away and it shrinks back down. It is a single, lightweight .exe with no runtime to install.

• Layered per-pixel alpha window, software rendered with tiny-skia
• Small memory footprint: embedded fonts, bounded glyph cache, working set trimmed when idle
• Your data stays local in %APPDATA%\poch

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Slides

Swipe, scroll, drag, use the arrow buttons or click the dots to move through an endless carousel.

Icon	Slide	What it does
	Music	Now Playing from Spotify, browsers and other media apps, with artwork, progress bar and playback controls. The clock and date sit on the right of the same slide.
	Water	Daily water tracker with quick add buttons, a daily goal (1.5 to 3.0 L) and optional reminders.
	To-do	Simple checklist with add, edit and delete. Scrolls when the list gets long.
	Ledge	A shelf for up to 5 files or folders. Drop them in, click to open, drag them back out (copy by default, hold Shift to move).
	Scrap	Mini notepad, up to 3,333 characters, with caret, selection, clipboard and a live character counter.

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Features

Icon	Feature	Details
	Media control	Reads Windows media sessions (GSMTC). Artwork comes from the session, with a fallback to the iTunes Search API.
	Idle clock	When nothing is playing, the notch shows the time, then switches to a blinking eye with a red glow, then loops.
	Busy mode	With a maximized or fullscreen window (or Adobe apps in front), the notch shrinks to a thin line. Hover to open it.
	Hotkey	Ctrl + Alt + H toggles between the clock and the eye.
	Drop animation	Dropping a file onto the notch makes its bottom edge ripple like water.
	Artwork tint	The Music slide picks up colors from the album cover for a soft glow.

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Install

Requirement	Version
Operating system	Windows 10 or Windows 11
Build tools (only to build from source)	Rust (stable)
Installer (optional)	Inno Setup, using poch.iss

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Build from source

git clone <your-repo-url>
cd poch
cargo build --release

The executable is created at target\release\poch.exe. To make a setup installer, open poch.iss in Inno Setup and compile it.

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Project layout

File	Purpose
main.rs	App state, window creation, message loop
window.rs	Win32 window procedure (mouse, keyboard, timer, hotkey, file drop)
render.rs, gfx.rs	Frame drawing, notch shape, text and shape helpers
anim.rs	Spring animation, timers, hover, busy and media polling
music.rs	Media thread, artwork and artwork tint, Music slide
clock.rs	Clock and date helpers
water.rs, todo.rs, shelf.rs, note.rs	Water, To-do, Ledge and Scrap slides
dragdrop.rs	OLE drag out of the Ledge
eye.rs, busy.rs, icon.rs	Eye animation, busy detection, app icons
nav.rs, input.rs, config.rs, data.rs	Carousel, clicks and menu, shared sizes, data storage

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Your data

Everything is saved as plain text in %APPDATA%\poch:

File	Content
todo.txt	To-do items
water.txt	Water intake, goal and reminder settings
shelf.txt	Files on the Ledge
notepad.txt	Scrap note

Right click the notch for water options and to exit the app.

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License

Released under the MIT License.

You are free to use, modify, fork and redistribute Poch, as long as you keep the copyright notice and credit:

Copyright (c) 2026 Commonly Works

Any copy or fork, whether source or compiled, must include the LICENSE file with this credit.

The embedded font is Instrument Sans, used under its own open font license.

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Made by Commonly Works