Yes. NotchDeck is open source under the MIT License, with no account, no ads and no paid tier. The code is on GitHub. If it earns its place in your notch, you can tip on Ko-fi.
Your notch,
put to work.
NotchDeck turns the MacBook notch into a small deck. Hover over it for music, your next events, a timer, todos, a file tray and notifications. Volume and brightness show up there too.
Free and open source (MIT). macOS 14 or newer, Apple Silicon. Signed and notarized by Apple. No account.
Seven tabs and a HUD
Music and Spotify are read and controlled directly; any other player comes through macOS's own Now Playing. Play, pause, skip and scrub from the notch. While something plays, the closed notch shows the cover and moving bars.
It stays a notch until you need it
No window, no Dock icon. NotchDeck lives in the menu bar and in the notch, and it changes shape only when there is something to show.
-
Closed
It looks like the notch. With music playing or a timer running, a small cover or icon sits on either side. Clicks pass through to the menu bar.
-
Peek
Volume, brightness, plugging in the charger and a finished timer widen it for a moment, then it tucks back in.
-
Open
Hover over the notch and it opens; move away and it closes. Drag a file onto it and the tray opens, ready to drop.
Add your own tab
A plugin is a folder with one manifest.json in ~/Library/Application Support/NotchDeck/Plugins. It gets its own tab with a line of text and buttons that open a web page, a file or an app. NotchDeck loads no code from plugins, so a plugin can do nothing a link can't. Relaunch NotchDeck to pick it up.
{
"id": "standup",
"title": "Standup",
"icon": "person.3",
"text": "Daily standup at 10:00.",
"buttons": [
{ "label": "Join call", "symbol": "video",
"url": "https://example.com/standup" },
{ "label": "Notes",
"url": "~/Documents/standup.md" }
]
}Details
- Only what you use. Turn any module off in Settings and it stops completely, its tab gone.
- Quiet. Modules wait for the system to tell them something changed instead of checking every second.
- True black. The panel is pure black, so it melts into the notch and the bezel around it.
- Your pace. Set how long the pointer rests on the notch before it opens, from instant to 0.6 s.
- No notch? On a Mac without one, NotchDeck draws a notch-sized pill at the top of the screen.
It stays on your Mac.
No account, no analytics, no tracking. Your events, todos, notifications and what you are playing are read on your Mac and shown in the notch, never sent anywhere. NotchDeck goes online for two things: once a day it checks this site for a newer version, which it never installs without asking, and while Spotify plays, it loads the cover picture from Spotify's servers, as Spotify does.
Questions
Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or newer) with macOS 14 Sonoma or later. It is made for MacBooks with a notch. On a Mac without one, it draws a notch-sized pill at the top centre of the built-in screen, or of the main screen on a desktop Mac.
Each module asks only for what it needs, when you first use it: Calendar when you press Allow in the Calendar tab, Automation the first time it talks to Music or Spotify, Accessibility for the volume and brightness keys, and Full Disk Access for Notifications, because macOS keeps them in a database only that permission can read. Skip one and only that module waits; the rest works. Settings explains each one.
It shows what macOS has recorded in Notification Center, which can include alerts mirrored from your iPhone. macOS does not record which device an alert came from, so an optional filter shows only apps that are not installed on this Mac, which is usually your phone. Clearing an alert in NotchDeck hides it there only; Notification Center is never changed.
NotchDeck handles the volume and brightness keys only when it can do the job itself. With Option or Command held, on an output without volume control, or where it can't set the display's brightness, the key goes to macOS as usual. Without Accessibility permission, volume changes still show in the notch; the keys just keep their macOS overlay.
NotchDeck uses Sparkle, the standard update framework for Mac apps outside the App Store. Once a day it checks this site for a newer version and installs one only when you say so; nothing updates on its own. To check right away, choose Check for Updates… in the menu bar icon. There is no setting in the app to turn the daily check off.
Open the disk image, drag NotchDeck to Applications and open it. It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without warnings. Settings, Check for Updates… and Quit are in its menu bar icon. To remove it, quit, drag it to the Trash and delete the NotchDeck folder in ~/Library/Application Support.
Found a bug? Tell me.
Something broke, an idea for a module, a notch that looks wrong on your Mac: I read every message. For business, write to lenny@lqoro.com.
Give the notch something to do.
Version 1.0.0, disk image, Apple Silicon, macOS 14 or newer. Older versions are on the releases page, and the source code is on GitHub under the MIT License. By downloading you agree to the terms; the privacy page lists every permission and what it is used for.