Your Mac. Your business.

What FunNotch is.

The notch on a MacBook is a strip of screen that does nothing. FunNotch gives it a job. Hover it and a panel opens with what is playing, the files you parked, the things you copied, a focus timer and your notes. Closed, it shows up to thirteen small widgets beside the camera, a little like the Dynamic Island on an iPhone.

It is written in Swift for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, runs on Apple Silicon and Intel, and works on displays without a notch by drawing a floating island in the same place. The current version is 1.3, released on September 27, 2026.

Who makes it.

One developer, JoshuaT1105, working on it in their spare time. There is no company behind FunNotch, no funding, no team, and no plan to sell you anything later. It is free because it costs nothing to give away, not as a trial for something else.

It began as a rebuild of TheBoringNotch, which got to the idea first and is still a good answer if you want a larger community behind your notch app. FunNotch then grew its own direction: clipboard history, focus sessions that block apps and websites, daily notes and a home screen you compose yourself. The comparison page sets the two side by side, along with NotchNook and Alcove.

You can follow development, read every commit and report problems at github.com/JoshuaT1105/FunNotch. Announcements are posted on X at @FunNotch.

What the app does with your data.

The short version: no accounts, no analytics, no tracking, no crash reporting and no telemetry of any kind. Nothing about how you use the app leaves your Mac, because nothing in the app is written to collect it. FunNotch makes network requests in three situations, all of which you can see coming:

• Weather. The forecast is requested from Open-Meteo, a free weather API that needs no account and no API key. It uses your location only if you allow Location.
• Album artwork. Artwork is fetched from whatever your music source hands over: Apple Music, Spotify or the page in your browser. If nothing is playing, this never happens.
• Updates. The app checks the project’s GitHub releases for a new version, and downloads nothing until you agree.

That is the complete list. Everything else is local: the file shelf, clipboard history, focus sessions, widgets, the HUD and the games. Daily notes are plain text files in a folder on your Desktop. Clipboard history expires after 24 hours by default, and anything a password manager marks as concealed is skipped and never recorded.

Every macOS permission is optional and enables one feature. The install guide lists each permission and what it is for, and the app’s Diagnostics screen shows what it can currently see. Because FunNotch is open source, none of this has to be taken on trust: the code that does it is public.

Why macOS warns you about it.

FunNotch is signed ad-hoc, not with a paid Apple Developer certificate, so Gatekeeper refuses the first launch and says it cannot verify the developer. The honest reason is that a Developer ID costs $99 a year, and this is a free app made by one person.

The warning means Apple has not checked this app. It does not mean Apple found something wrong with it: an unnotarized app and a malicious one produce the same dialog, which is why the warning is worth taking seriously in general. Judge FunNotch the way you would judge any unsigned software, on whether you trust where it came from. Releases are published only on GitHub, next to the source they are built from. The install guide walks through opening it.

What this website does.

This site counts visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and does not follow you across other sites. It runs no advertising scripts. The interactive demo on the home page is a browser recreation that runs on sample weather, calendar and device data.

Files and local audio you add to the demo stay in your browser’s memory, are never uploaded, and clear when you reload. Notes, preferences and game high scores use this site’s local browser storage. Clipboard history starts with samples and anything you explicitly paste; copying uses the browser clipboard only after you act. The three demo songs are bundled with the site and credited in the player and on the legal page.

Made in the open.

FunNotch is released under the GNU General Public License v3. You can read it, build it, change it and share it under the same license. The browser recreation on this site is GPL-3.0 as well and ships with its own source.

• FunNotch on GitHubSource code, releases and issue tracker.
• Browser demo sourceThe HTML, CSS and JavaScript behind this site’s demo.
• Install guideDownload, first launch, permissions and updates.
• Compare notch appsFunNotch next to BoringNotch, NotchNook and Alcove.