NotchLand

Bring your MacBook's notch to life.

NotchLand lives in your notch, not your menu bar. It stays anchored there across every desktop and Space, moving with the same fluid, spring-loaded animations Apple uses for its own system UI — so it feels like a feature macOS shipped, not an app you installed. Media controls, system HUDs, AirDrop, live activities, calendar peeks, and more, all in one place. A native SwiftUI + AppKit menu-bar app built in the open.

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Contents

• What it does
• Features
• Gallery
• Requirements
• Build & run
• Architecture
• Contributing
• License
• Acknowledgments

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What it does

NotchLand runs as an accessory app (no Dock icon) and overlays a floating panel exactly where your MacBook's notch sits. It stays out of the way until something happens worth showing — then it expands, animates, and collapses back.

It sticks to the notch, not the menu bar. Switch desktops, move between Spaces, go full-screen — NotchLand stays anchored to the notch on every one of them, with the same fluid, spring-loaded animations Apple uses for its own system UI. That's the main thing NotchLand does differently: it feels like a feature built into macOS, not a third-party app running alongside it.

Designed for a MacBook with a display notch — NotchLand renders a floating panel where the notch lives.

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Features

Feature	Description
Notch-native, not menu-bar	Anchored to the notch across every desktop and Space, with fluid, Apple-style animations — feels like a built-in macOS feature, not a third-party app.
Now Playing	Live media controls and artwork for whatever's playing, right in the notch.
AirDrop	Drag a shareable file near the notch and a drop zone opens — only for content AirDrop can actually accept — and confirms the drop.
System HUDs	Clean, Apple-style overlays for volume and brightness.
Battery alerts	Charging and low-battery notices surface in the notch.
Focus alerts	A heads-up whenever your Focus mode changes.
Calendar & countdown	A next-event peek and a countdown chip for what's coming up.
Lock / unlock showcase	A padlock animation on lock and a "welcome back" card on unlock, with away-time, battery, and your next event.
Guided onboarding	A first-launch walkthrough introduces the features and requests Calendar and Accessibility permissions step by step, both skippable.

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Gallery

More screenshots & demo GIFs coming soon — contributions welcome! Drop images into docs/images/ and wire them into this section.

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Requirements

• macOS 26.3 or later
• Xcode 26.4 or later (to build from source)
• A MacBook with a display notch (recommended)

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Build & run

NotchLand is a standard Xcode project — no Swift Package Manager manifest, dependencies are resolved through Xcode (Sparkle, Lottie).

# Clone
git clone https://github.com/scienceLabwork/NotchLand.git
cd NotchLand

# Build (Debug) from the command line
xcodebuild -project NotchLand.xcodeproj -scheme NotchLand -configuration Debug build

# …or just open it in Xcode (preferred for iteration — SwiftUI Previews need Xcode)
open NotchLand.xcodeproj

Run the tests (Swift Testing, hosted in the app target):

xcodebuild -project NotchLand.xcodeproj -scheme NotchLand -configuration Debug test \
  -destination 'platform=macOS'

Building as a contributor? The project ships with the maintainer's signing Team (H7RVWCMKF5). To build locally, open Signing & Capabilities in Xcode and set your own Team (or disable signing). App Sandbox is off and Hardened Runtime is on by default.

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Architecture

NotchLand is a SwiftUI/AppKit hybrid that runs as an LSUIElement accessory app. Most of the interesting design lives in one clean pipeline:

Controller  ──publishes──▶  Presentation { branchKey }  ──▶  FloatingNotchView
(ObservableObject)                                            (priority-ordered switch)

• AppDelegate bootstraps the shared singletons (NotchSettings, AppState, WindowManager) and keeps the app alive after settings windows close.
• WindowManager owns the borderless floating NSPanel, the menu-bar companion item, global drag monitors, and launch-at-login via SMAppService.
• Feature controllers each publish a Presentation whose branchKey feeds a single priority-ordered switch in FloatingNotchView: screen-lock → airdrop-drop-target → battery → focus → expanded → hud → collapsed. Adding a feature means adding a branch — not touching the others.
• Settings (SettingsView, SettingsSidebar, *SettingsView) is a sidebar + forms + a right-hand live preview of the notch.

This makes the codebase easy to extend: a new overlay is a new controller, a new branchKey, and a content view — wired in at four well-defined points.

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Contributing

Contributions of all sizes are welcome — bug reports, fixes, features, and docs. To get started:

• Read CONTRIBUTING.md for the full setup, signing, and build/test walkthrough.
• Match the surrounding code style (there's no linter — read the neighbors).
• Keep non-UI work off the main actor (the project defaults types to @MainActor).
• Open an issue to discuss anything larger than a small fix before sending a big PR.
• Keep PRs focused, and make sure the project builds and tests pass before requesting review.

Note on updates: publishing Sparkle updates requires the maintainer's private EdDSA signing key and is maintainer-only. The public key in Info.plist is intentionally public and safe to ship.

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License

NotchLand is released under the Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE for the full text and third-party attributions. By contributing, you agree your contributions are licensed under the same terms.

It bundles:

• Sparkle — permissive MIT-style license.
• Lottie — Apache License 2.0.

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Acknowledgments

• Sparkle and Lottie for the open-source foundations this app builds on.
• Everyone who files an issue, opens a PR, or just gives the notch a try. 🙌

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Designed, built, and maintained by Rudra Shah.

If NotchLand is useful to you, a ⭐ on the repo means a lot.