NotchIsland

A native macOS notch app inspired by Boring Notch, built with Dynamic Island–style interactions: a compact pill that lives flush with the physical notch and morphs into an expanded panel on hover.

⬇ Download NotchIsland.dmg

Open the DMG, drag NotchIsland into Applications, then launch it. Since it isn't notarized, the first launch needs a right-click → Open (macOS will otherwise refuse to run an app from an unidentified developer).

Features

• Dynamic Island–style morphing — idle pill → compact indicator → expanded panel, animated with a spring, fully click-through everywhere except the visible shape (so it never blocks clicks on apps underneath it).
• Now Playing — shows title/artist/artwork and play/pause/next/previous controls for whatever's playing in your browser (via a companion browser extension, see below), with multi-activity stacking when more than one thing is active.
• Battery alerts — a brief HUD-style bubble on charger plug/unplug.
• File shelf — drag files onto the expanded panel to hold them, then drag them back out into Finder or another app later.
• Clipboard history — recent copies, click to copy back, clear anytime.
• Volume/brightness HUD — shows a matching bar in the notch when you press those keys (alongside macOS's own, not a replacement — see Limitations).
• Wi-Fi toggle — quick on/off from the expanded panel.

Why a browser extension for media?

This macOS version blocks the private MediaRemote framework (the API every "now playing" menu bar app relies on) for any process that isn't Apple-signed — confirmed by testing a byte-for-byte-identical compiled binary against Apple's own swift interpreter tool. Since there's no way around that without an Apple-internal entitlement, media info instead comes from the page's own public Media Session API via a small companion browser extension that posts to a local server the app runs on 127.0.0.1:47624.

Installing the browser extension

1. Open chrome://extensions
2. Enable Developer mode (top right)
3. Click Load unpacked, select the BrowserExtension/ folder in this repo
4. Play something — the notch should pick it up within a couple seconds

Building & running

Requires Xcode Command Line Tools (Swift 5.10+ toolchain) — no full Xcode install needed.

As a proper .app (universal binary — Apple Silicon + Intel):

./Scripts/build_app.sh
cp -R .build/NotchIsland.app /Applications/
open /Applications/NotchIsland.app

The build is unsigned/unnotarized, so the very first launch needs a right-click → Open, or run xattr -cr /Applications/NotchIsland.app first.

For quick local iteration (single-arch debug build, no bundle):

swift build
.build/debug/NotchIsland

Either way it runs as a background accessory app (no Dock icon). To stop it: pkill -f NotchIsland.

Limitations

• Media only works in the browser, not Music.app/Spotify — see above for why (MediaRemote read access is blocked; app-specific control still works via simulated media-key presses).
• Volume/brightness HUD is additive, not a replacement — hiding macOS's native OSD requires Accessibility permission for a blocking event tap, which this project deliberately avoids for now.
• Wi-Fi toggle only — Bluetooth has no public toggle API (would need the third-party blueutil CLI), and Do Not Disturb/Focus modes have no reliable programmatic toggle on modern macOS.
• Notch geometry is read from NSScreen.auxiliaryTopLeftArea/auxiliaryTopRightArea, so it should size and position correctly on any notched MacBook (14"/16" MacBook Pro, MacBook Air M2+) automatically. Non-notched Macs (older MacBooks, external displays, desktops) fall back to a small virtual island centered at the top of the screen instead of failing outright.

Architecture

• Sources/NotchIsland/App/ — NSPanel-based overlay window, positioned once at a fixed frame under the notch; hover detection polls cursor position at ~12Hz (not a global event monitor) to keep CPU/battery usage low.
• Sources/NotchIsland/Services/ — media (local HTTP server), battery (IOKit), clipboard (pasteboard polling), Wi-Fi (networksetup), file shelf, volume/brightness key observation.
• Sources/NotchIsland/Views/ — SwiftUI views for each state (idle/compact/expanded/alert) and each activity kind.
• BrowserExtension/ — Manifest V3 extension bridging page media info to the local server.

Security & privacy

• Nothing is collected, stored remotely, or sent anywhere. No accounts, no analytics, no telemetry. Everything below runs entirely on your own Mac.
• Clipboard history is in-memory only — never written to disk, gone on quit, and clearable anytime. It also checks for the nspasteboard.org ConcealedType/TransientType/AutoGeneratedType markers that password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden tag their copies with, and skips recording those — the same convention respected clipboard managers (Alfred, Raycast, Paste) follow.
• The local media server binds to loopback only (requiredInterfaceType = .loopback on the NWListener), not just "port 47624" — meaning it's unreachable from other devices on the same Wi-Fi/LAN, only from processes on the same Mac. (An earlier version of this server didn't set that explicitly and technically listened on all interfaces; verified fixed by confirming a request from the Mac's own LAN IP is refused while 127.0.0.1 still works.)
• File shelf only references file paths — files aren't copied, duplicated, or uploaded anywhere; dragging one out just hands the original file reference to whatever it's dropped on.
• No elevated permissions are requested anywhere. Media key observation, Wi-Fi toggling, and volume reading all use plain public APIs/CLIs (NSEvent system-defined events, networksetup, osascript) that don't require Accessibility, Input Monitoring, or Full Disk Access — deliberately, since a background app asking for those would itself be a bigger trust question. See Limitations for what that trade-off costs feature-wise.
• It's all open source — every claim above is verifiable by reading the code in Sources/NotchIsland/Services/.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.