1.0.1 — universal — macOS 14+
The best part of your display is doing nothing.
Your Mac spends every day rendering a black rectangle at the top of the screen. FunNotch is a free Mac notch app that fills it — with what's playing, what you dragged there, what you copied, and how long until you're allowed to stop working. It turns the MacBook notch into something closer to the Dynamic Island on an iPhone, except you choose what goes in it.
Hover the notch
Drawn from this Mac's actual settings: Clock and Battery inside the panel either side of the camera, media sharing the row with them, album-art spectrum, system accent.
What is a Mac notch app?
A Mac notch app is a utility that draws content into and around the camera cutout at the top of a MacBook screen — the strip of display macOS otherwise leaves black. Instead of wasting that space, a notch app uses it for things you would otherwise go looking for: the track that's playing, files you're moving between apps, the clock, the battery, your next meeting.
The idea is borrowed from the Dynamic Island on the iPhone, which turns its own cutout into a live status area. macOS ships nothing equivalent, so the MacBook notch stays empty by default. FunNotch is a free one for macOS 14 and later, on both Apple Silicon and Intel.
What it does
Five things your MacBook notch could be doing instead
Every panel below is the real notch, on a real desktop. Hover one — and drag your pointer across the last one.
A shelf that catches things mid-drag
Pick up a file anywhere on your Mac and the notch opens to meet you. Let go and it's held — then drag it back out wherever you need it.
- Screenshots land on it automatically
- Finished downloads too, if you want them
- Rename, expire after a while, send to a folder
- AirDrop or share straight off the shelf
- Text and images, not just files
Clipboard history worth keeping
Everything you've copied, searchable, with the ones you care about pinned to the top.
- Search as you type
- Pin the things you paste all day
- Images as well as text
- Choose how much it remembers
Focus sessions that actually block things
Start a timer and the sites and apps you named stop being available until it runs out. The countdown stays in the closed notch, so you can see how long is left without opening anything.
- Blocks websites in Safari, Chrome, Brave, Edge and Arc
- Blocks whole apps, not just their websites
- Pomodoro cycles with breaks, and a running session total
- Pauses your music, and can fire a Shortcut at each end
- Hides the game while you're focusing, which is the point
Twelve widgets, either side of the camera
Battery, clock, date, focus countdown, next event, now playing, CPU, memory, disk, weather, Wi-Fi, moon phase. As many as you like per side, in whatever order.
- Clicking one opens the thing it's about
- Widths measured from the rendered text, so nothing clips
- While music plays: media, media and widgets, or widgets only
Media and widgets
And a game, obviously
Notch Breakout, across the full width of the panel. The paddle follows your mouse — which is not a stylistic choice. The notch is a non-activating panel, so it never becomes the key window and keyboard events go to whatever app is actually in front. Pointer position is the only input that works up here.
- Every brick drops a powerup — it gets silly fast
- Closing the notch pauses your run instead of ending it
- Move your pointer across the panel — this one is playable
Also in the box
Everything else this Mac notch app does
None of this has an animation above, and all of it ships today.
It replaces the system HUD
Volume, brightness and keyboard backlight appear in the notch — and the big grey square in the middle of your screen doesn't appear at all. It catches the key before macOS acts on it, so there's never one of each.
Your menu bar, your call
Pick the icon or have none at all, and put a live readout next to it: what's playing, battery, the focus countdown, your next event, or how many things are on the shelf.
AirDrop off the shelf
Send what's sitting there to another Mac or an iPhone without opening Finder. The full macOS share sheet is one click further, so Messages, Mail and everything else is there too.
Music from a browser tab
YouTube, Spotify web, SoundCloud, Apple Music, Bandcamp, Twitch. Not the tab title — the page itself, so you get the real title, artist, artwork and a progress bar that moves.
Scrub, shuffle, repeat
Drag the progress bar to seek. Shuffle and repeat are right there, showing the player's actual state rather than a guess at it.
Invisible to screen recording
Optionally excluded from captures and screen shares, so a demo of your app doesn't come with a notch full of your calendar.
Sneak peeks
The track changes and the closed notch briefly says what it is, then gets out of the way. Same for volume, charging and connecting headphones.
Colour taken from the artwork
The panel tint, the progress bar and the spectrum can all pull their colour from whatever is playing. Or ignore it and use your accent colour, or one you pick.
Calendar & reminders
This week at a glance, today's agenda, and a Join button that finds the link inside Zoom, Meet, Teams and Webex invitations.
Battery & power
Charge level in the header, and a live activity when the charger goes in or comes out.
Bluetooth activities
Devices announce themselves as they connect and disconnect, with battery level where the device reports one.
Downloads & screenshots
Finished downloads and new screenshots are announced and can go straight to the shelf. Browser placeholder files are ignored until they're real.
Mirror
A camera preview in the corner of the panel, round or square, for checking your hair before the call.
Themes
Six presets, plus save your current look under your own name. Accent, tint, border, progress and spectrum colours.
Gestures and haptics
Two-finger swipe down to open, up to close, with adjustable sensitivity — and a trackpad tap when it opens. Or just hover. Or click.
Any display
Notch or no notch, one screen or five. Set the size, border width and corner radius to match your Mac, and let it follow your pointer between displays or stay put.
Stays out of the way
It steps aside for fullscreen video, and backs off its polling when the screen is locked or asleep, so an idle Mac stays idle.
Diagnostics
One screen saying exactly what the app can and can't currently see, and what to do about each gap. Permissions that were never granted stop looking like bugs.
Actual screenshots
The real panel, not a drawing
Every animation above this line is CSS. These three are rendered straight out of the app, so they are what the notch panel genuinely looks like.
Get it
Download FunNotch free — two and a half megabytes
Universal binary. Nothing to sign up for.