For MacBook Pro
The black bar at the top of your screen has been sitting there doing nothing since 2021. Now it plays your music, counts your timers, catches your files and greets your AirPods.
Hover the notch — it behaves like the real thing.
Free and open source · Version 1.0.1 · Requires macOS 26 or later
The exact size of your notch, in the same black, with no corner flare. It disappears into the hardware.
Artwork on one side, a visualiser on the other — around the camera, never across it.
A scrubber, transport and album art. The window never resizes; the shape does.
A timer counts down in one ear while the music carries on in the other, exactly like the real island.
What it does
Every one lives in the same black shape, so nothing new competes for room on your screen.
Album art in one ear, a visualiser in the other. Open it for a scrubber and transport. Music and Spotify.
A ring that drains beside the time. Timers running in Apple's Clock app are mirrored here too.
An inline bar in the notch, instead of the blurry square in the middle of your screen.
Drag files at the notch and it opens to catch them. Drag them back out into any app.
Connect them and it throws itself open: the case turning on the spot, buds lifting out, left, right and case charge.
Charger in, battery low, a padlock when you lock, a dot while the microphone is live.
How it's built
That's the whole trick. The panel is permanently the size of its largest state, transparent, and click-through everywhere it isn't drawing — so your menu bar stays usable. Every open, close and morph is a shape animating inside a window that never moves, which is why it flows like one object instead of stepping a frame at a time.
At rest it is the exact size of your notch, in the same dead black, with zero corner flare. Every spring in the app is defined in one file, so the whole surface accelerates and settles together.
| Now playing | Apple events, plus each app's distributed notifications for instant reactions. No private APIs. |
| Volume | CoreAudio property listeners — event-driven, no polling. |
| Brightness | Polled, with an ambient-light filter: the sensor ramps, a key press is one jump out of stillness. |
| AirPods battery | system_profiler, which reports left, right and case separately. |
| Hover | Global NSEvent monitors — no Accessibility prompt. |
| Permissions | One, for Automation, and only so it can ask Music and Spotify what's playing. |
Install
Download the disk image, drag Dynamic Notch across, and open it. There's no Dock icon — look in the menu bar, and look up.
This app isn't notarised — that needs a paid Apple Developer account — so Gatekeeper has nothing to check it against. Every unnotarised app gets the same dialog; it isn't a warning about this one in particular. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, click Open Anyway, and open it again. Or, from Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Dynamic Notch.app"| Version | 1.0.1 |
| Requires | macOS 26 or later. Apple silicon or Intel. |
| A notch | Not required — Macs without one get a notch of pleasant proportions drawn in the same place. |
| Building it | make run builds and launches; make dmg packages a release. |