FunNotch

Your MacBook notch, doing something.

Media, a drag-and-drop file shelf, clipboard history, focus sessions, daily notes, a timer and thirteen widgets — all in the space around the camera.

Download · funnotch.xyz · Install guide · Changelog

Free and open source. No account, no subscription, no telemetry.

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What it does

• Home — a grid you compose yourself. Drag widgets in, resize them, and save layouts. Give a case its own screen: one for when media is playing, one for the minutes before a meeting, one for a focus session, one for charging.
• Weather — when nothing is playing, the panel shows the forecast as an animated pixel scene that changes with the weather: sun, rain onto a skyline, drifting snow, lightning.
• Media — now playing from Music, Spotify and any browser, with artwork, a live spectrum, and a progress bar you can drag to seek.
• Shelf — a drag-and-drop file shelf that opens to meet a drag already in flight. AirDrop and share straight off it; catches new screenshots and finished downloads on its own.
• Clipboard — searchable history with pinning, and entries that expire after 24 hours by default. Anything a password manager marks concealed is skipped and never recorded.
• Focus & Timer — focus sessions that block websites and apps, with Pomodoro cycles, a week chart and a streak; plus a countdown and a stopwatch with laps, all around one dial you drag round to set.
• Notes — a scratchpad that starts a new note each day and saves to your Desktop, with the old ones a menu away.
• Battery — charge level, and while charging the actual wattage, with the meter coloured and animated by state.
• Widgets — thirteen of them, any number either side of the camera.
• HUD — volume, brightness and keyboard backlight that replaces the system overlay rather than sitting beside it.
• No notch? Still works. On an external display it draws a floating pill in the same place, like the Dynamic Island.
• And — camera mirror, calendar and reminders, meeting-link detection, custom themes, automatic updates, a diagnostics screen, and two games: Breakout and Dino Run.

Shelf — drop a file on the notch and it is held until you drag it out.

Clipboard — searchable, pinnable, labelled with where each entry came from.

Focus — sessions that actually block apps and sites.

_{Also in the box}

Timer — countdowns and a stopwatch with laps.	Weather — the pixel scene follows the forecast.	No notch? — it becomes a floating island instead.
Widgets — thirteen, any number either side of the camera.	And a game, because the space was there.	Sneak peek — track changes announce themselves, then get out of the way.

Install

Download the latest .dmg, drag FunNotch to Applications, and open it.

First launch. Builds are signed ad-hoc rather than with a paid Apple Developer certificate, so macOS will refuse the first open. Go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway, or right-click the app in Applications and choose Open. After that it opens normally, and updates arrive in-app.

Full walkthrough: funnotch.xyz/install.

Building

No Xcode project — the app builds with swiftc directly.

./build.sh                       # debug build into build/
./build.sh --universal           # arm64 + x86_64
./build.sh --universal --package # ...and produce dist/*.dmg and dist/*.zip

Requires the Xcode command line tools. Everything under build/ and dist/ is generated and git-ignored.

Signing

Builds are signed ad-hoc by default, which is why macOS refuses the first launch. If you have a paid Apple Developer certificate:

./build.sh --universal --package \
  --sign "Developer ID Application: Your Name (TEAMID)" \
  --notarize your-notary-profile

Verifying a change

There is a self-test that drives the real window manager rather than mocking it — it opens and closes the notch, simulates drags, and checks the panel geometry.

build/FunNotch.app/Contents/MacOS/FunNotch --self-test

It needs a GUI session, so it will not run over plain SSH. There is also a preview renderer that writes every notch state to PNG, which is how the screenshots in this README are produced:

build/FunNotch.app/Contents/MacOS/FunNotch --render-preview /tmp/shots

And a diagnostics dump:

build/FunNotch.app/Contents/MacOS/FunNotch --diagnostics

Layout

Sources/
  App/          Lifecycle, status bar, self-test, preview renderer
  Core/         Settings, home-screen layout model, extensions, diagnostic log
  Managers/     Media, shelf, clipboard, focus, notes, timer, calendar,
                battery, weather, HUD, updates
  Settings/     The settings window and the home-screen editor
  Views/        The notch panel and everything drawn in it
Tools/
  MakeIcon.swift    Generates the app icon at build time
  fetch-sparkle.sh  Pins and verifies the Sparkle framework
  make-appcast.sh   Signs a release for the auto-updater

The marketing site at funnotch.xyz is deliberately not in this repo — it isn't part of the app, and it deploys separately.

Permissions it asks for

None are required; each one only enables the feature that needs it.

Permission	Used for
Accessibility	The HUD — catching the media key before macOS acts on it
Calendar & Reminders	The agenda beside the player
Camera	The camera mirror, only while open
Location	The weather scene, to pick a forecast

The app makes network requests in exactly three situations: api.open-meteo.com for the weather, album artwork from whatever URL your media source provides, and a GitHub check for updates. There is no analytics, no crash reporting and no telemetry of any kind. See the About page.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. A few things worth knowing:

• Match the surrounding code. Comments here explain why, not what — if a line needs a comment saying what it does, the line is usually the problem.
• Run --self-test before opening a PR. If you change window geometry, drag handling or the HUD, add a check to Sources/App/SelfTest.swift.
• The notch is a non-activating panel. It never becomes the key window, so keyboard events go to whatever app is actually in front. Anything interactive up there has to work from pointer position alone.
• Managers are singletons with a start(). Make start() idempotent — a view calling it on every onAppear should not stack timers or run-loop sources. That bug once locked the whole app.

Prior art

FunNotch began as a rebuild of TheBoringNotch, which got to the idea first and is a genuinely good app. There is an honest comparison on the website, including the things theirs does better.

Licence

GPL-3.0. If you distribute a modified version, it has to be open too.