AloeNotch

Your MacBook's notch, awake.
A Dynamic Island for the Mac — free, open source, and invisible until you hover.

Download for macOS · Website · 23-second film · Changelog

_{Apple Silicon · macOS 26 or later · 3 MB download · 37 MB in memory · under 1% of one core when idle · MIT}

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What it does

Collapsed, AloeNotch hugs the hardware notch to the pixel — pure black, nothing added. Hover it, or press ⌃⌥N, and it opens into a panel.

Now Playing, everywhere	Apple Music, Spotify, even YouTube in a browser tab. Artwork, title, transport controls, shuffle and repeat, and a scrubber you can drag.
Lyrics and a live equalizer	Optional. Time-synced lyrics under the title (click for the next line too), and equalizer bars that follow the actual music.
Ambient Glow and glass	The artwork's colour traces the panel's edge. Optionally, the open panel frosts the desktop behind it; collapsed, it stays pure black over the camera.
The Shelf	Drag a file onto the notch and it opens to catch it. Files persist across launches; drag them back out one at a time or all at once, or right-click to compress a file or convert an image.
Clipboard history	The last 24 things you copied, one click to copy again. Pin up to six, search all of it, and copy back with or without formatting. Memory only — never written to disk — and anything a password manager marks private is skipped.
Timer, stopwatch, focus	Start one from the panel and it takes over the collapsed strip while it runs. Your next event can count down there for its last ten minutes.
Your day at a glance	The next 24 hours of your calendar, local weather with an hourly forecast, and a clock.
Volume & brightness	Optional replacement for the macOS HUD, with bars in white, your accent, a colour each, or tinted by whatever's playing.
Little announcements	Caps Lock, microphone mute, low battery, Low Power Mode, headphones connecting (with their battery) and drives mounting each get a brief note.
Sound output	Switch between speakers, AirPods and displays from the panel header.
Keep awake	One click stops the display sleeping; the assertion is released automatically if the app quits or crashes.
Out of the way	While an app is full screen, or any app you list is in front, the pointer can't open the panel. Esc closes it; ⌃⌥N gives it keyboard focus.
Motion you can dial	Calm, Standard or Lively — choose how much the panel overshoots when it opens. It can reverse mid-flight, ignores the pointer brushing past, and never bounces when closing, because the collapsed strip has to land on the notch exactly. Reduce Motion and Increase Contrast always win.

No notch? On other displays it draws its own strip in the same place, and everything works the same way. With more than one screen, it can live on one or on every display.

Privacy

• No analytics, no telemetry, no account.
• Three kinds of network request, all optional: weather for your approximate location (Open-Meteo, no key), lyrics for the song that's playing (LRCLIB, only with Lyrics on), and a once-a-day update check against aloenotch.com/appcast.xml via Sparkle, with its system profile turned off. Each can be switched off.
• No permissions to start with. Calendar, Location, Bluetooth (headphone battery) and system audio recording (live equalizer) are requested only when you turn those features on; Accessibility only if you want the volume and brightness HUD replaced. The keyboard shortcut uses Carbon hot keys and needs no permission at all.
• The full privacy policy lists everything the app reads.

Install

1. Download the .dmg and drag AloeNotch to Applications.
2. The first launch is blocked because the app isn't notarized yet: open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway. You only do this once.
3. AloeNotch lives in the menu bar. Hover the notch.

It checks for updates once a day and tells you in the menu bar. Click Install to see what changed; it downloads the update, checks its signature, and reopens on the new version, keeping your settings and permissions.

Intel Mac or macOS 15? 0.6.0 is the final build for you. It still works, but it no longer gets features or fixes.

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Building from source

Requires Xcode 26 on Apple Silicon.

1. Open OpenNotch.xcodeproj and select the OpenNotch scheme with a My Mac destination.
2. Set a signing identity (see Signing).
3. Press ⌘R. The first build fetches Sparkle, the only package dependency, through Swift Package Manager.

About the name. The product is AloeNotch (bundle id com.kadeslab.AloeNotch), but the Xcode project, scheme, source folder and .entitlements are still named OpenNotch. The internal name isn't user-visible, and renaming a file-system-synchronised Xcode project by hand isn't worth the risk.

Tests

./scripts/run-tests.sh

The pure logic — panel-state precedence, version comparison, clipboard history, countdown maths, motion presets and readout contrast — is compiled directly without an Xcode target, so the suite runs in about a second.

Signing

The project signs with a certificate named AloeNotch Signing. Without it the build fails with "No signing certificate found": set Signing & Capabilities → Signing Certificate to Sign to Run Locally, or create your own as below.

Why not just sign ad-hoc?

Ad-hoc signing makes the app's designated requirement a hash of the binary:

designated => cdhash H"6f08e071…"

macOS privacy permissions are keyed to that requirement, so every rebuild is a different app to the system — Calendar, Location and Accessibility grants are silently dropped each time you build, and each time a user installs an update. With a stable certificate the requirement becomes:

designated => identifier "com.kadeslab.AloeNotch" and certificate root = H"c90b8b3f…"

which is identical across builds, so permissions persist.

Creating one: Keychain Access → Certificate Assistant → Create a Certificate…, name it AloeNotch Signing, Identity Type Self Signed Root, Certificate Type Code Signing.

Back it up, private key included. Signing a future release with a different identity resets every user's permissions again, so the certificate is part of the app's identity.

A Developer ID certificate is strictly better — same stability, plus notarization, which removes the first-launch prompt:

SIGN_IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: Your Name (TEAMID)" ./scripts/make-dmg.sh

How it's put together

Area	Where	Notes
App lifecycle	OpenNotchApp.swift, AppDelegate.swift	Menu-bar accessory, no Dock icon
Notch geometry	Notch/NotchGeometry.swift	NSScreen.safeAreaInsets and the auxiliary top areas
Window	Notch/NotchPanel.swift, NotchWindowController.swift	Borderless, non-activating NSPanel above the menu bar; one per display when it's on every screen, all sharing one view model
Click-through	Notch/PassthroughHostingView.swift	Only the live notch rect takes mouse events
State	Notch/NotchViewModel.swift, Notch/PanelState.swift	Owns the feature managers; pure expand/collapse precedence
Live activities	Notch/LiveActivity.swift, ActivityDetectors.swift	HUDs, timer and other things that take over the strip
Motion	Design/Theme.swift, Design/MotionPersonality.swift	Springs, bounce presets, readout colours and contrast floor
Media	Media/*	mediaremote-adapter engine and now-playing manager
Shelf	Tray/TrayModel.swift, Views/TrayView.swift	Files persisted as bookmarks, so they survive being moved
Clipboard	System/ClipboardManager.swift, ClipboardHistory.swift	Pasteboard polling; honours nspasteboard.org concealed/transient types
Timer	Timer/*	Deadline-based, so it doesn't drift
System	System/*	Carbon hot key, CoreAudio output, IOPM keep-awake, volume/brightness
Settings	Settings/*, Views/Settings/*	Preferences window and menu-bar switchboard
Updates	Settings/UpdateChecker.swift	Sparkle 2 with an EdDSA-signed appcast; scripts/release.sh --ship writes it

Now Playing uses a private framework

MediaRemote is undocumented, and since macOS 15.4 Apple restricts its now-playing APIs for third-party apps. AloeNotch reads it through the vendored mediaremote-adapter (BSD-3), and if that ever stops working the media panel says so rather than crashing. Because it relies on private API, AloeNotch can't ship on the Mac App Store and could break with a macOS update.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. For anything bigger than a fix, open an issue first so we can talk it through. docs/design has the reasoning behind the motion and readout decisions.

If AloeNotch is useful to you, a ⭐ helps other people find it — and you can follow along on X for releases.

License

MIT. Not affiliated with Apple.