Notcholino

Turn your MacBook's Notch into a dynamic hub for Live Activities, notifications and interactive tools.

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Can't open the app? See how to allow it.

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GitHub Releases

All day

Interactive preview: hit skip, tap the dots, swipe. Nothing actually plays.

What is it?

Notcholino is a free and open-source notch app for macOS. It extends the hardware notch with a fluid overlay that expands on hover and shows what matters: now playing, upcoming events, volume and brightness, and more.

Alpha Notcholino is in early development. Expect rough edges and breaking changes between versions.

Features

Dynamic Notch

A native overlay that blends with the hardware notch, with multi-monitor support.

Now Playing

Control Spotify and Music, and see anything macOS reports as playing: YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video in a browser, Amazon Music and more.

Calendar & Reminders

See upcoming events and the reminders due today, and jump to them in Calendar.

System HUD

Volume and brightness feedback shown in the notch.

Native Settings

A System Settings–style preferences window built with SwiftUI.

Control Center & plugins

Add buttons to the notch with plugins, installed from a built-in store.

Shelf

Drag a screenshot, a recording or any file toward the notch: it keeps it for you, without saving it on the Desktop, until you drag it somewhere.

Popups & Do Not Disturb

A small message under the notch when AirPods, the charger or a disk connect, and a moon beside it while a Focus is on.

Notchy

A small glass cube that lives in the notch. Right-click text or a file, send it to Notchy and get a short summary; ask it to plan your day. Bring your own AI key (Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, Ollama). Early and off by default.

Updates in one click

When a new version is out, one button downloads it, checks it and restarts the app, keeping your permissions.

Join meetings

Calendar events with a Zoom, Meet or Teams link get a Join button.

Raycast

Raycast integration is in the works.

Reviews

What people who use Notcholino say, in their own words. Every review is written with a GitHub account and is tied to the version it is about.

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Used it? Tell others.

Write a review

Every review is a public GitHub issue from a real account (at least two weeks old), one per person per version. Negative reviews stay: only spam and abuse are removed. The maintainer's own reviews are not counted.

Light on your Mac

Notcholino stays out of the way. Measured on a MacBook Pro (Apple M5, macOS 26.6), with the notch closed, the mouse still and no music player open:

46 MBmemory

0.06 %CPU when idle

0.08energy impact

3.8 MBon disk

120 KBEspresso plugin

Opening the notch takes 47 MB and 0.05 % CPU. Espresso adds about 1.5 MB while it is on. You can measure it on your own Mac with scripts/benchmark.sh; the details are in the README.

Plugins

The Control Center panel of the notch holds plugin buttons. Open Settings → Control Center to install plugins from the built-in store: they are downloaded from the releases of this repository, at their latest version, after you confirm and a checksum check.

↕︎ Scrolly

A switch that reverses the vertical scroll of your mouse wheel and leaves the trackpad alone.

🌡️ Hotter

Your Mac's temperature as the button itself, green to red as it heats up. Click for average or highest, and a small graph.

🔋 BatLife

The battery level as the button, with health, cycles, power in use and time left.

🍅 Tomato

A Pomodoro timer: you choose the work and break minutes, it repeats, with a countdown that grows out of the notch and a sound.

✨ Dusty

Clean mode: black screen and a locked keyboard and trackpad for 5 to 60 seconds. ⌘⇧C ends it.

💻 CloseMe

Experimental. Keep the Mac running with the lid closed, with the screen off.

☕ Espresso

Keeps your Mac and its screen awake, indefinitely or for 10 minutes up to 12 hours, or until a time you pick. Try it in the preview above.

📋 Clippy

The last 10 things you copied, to copy again with a click. Kept in memory only, never on disk.

👁️ Watcher

An icon beside the notch while the microphone or the camera is in use, and a popup when it starts.

📡 Pinger

How fast your connection answers, as a number and a graph, and whether a VPN is on.

🎨 Picker

Pick a color from anywhere on your screen and copy it as HEX, RGB or HSL.

🔠 Reader

Drag over any text on the screen and it is copied to your clipboard.

🎧 Devices

The battery of your AirPods, mouse, keyboard and other Bluetooth devices.

🔒 Quicky

Lock the screen, turn the display off or start the screen saver, in one click.

🧹 Tidy

Hide the icons on your Desktop with one click, and show them again with another.

Want to write your own? See the plugins folder on GitHub.

Install

Requires macOS 14 or later. Download the latest build from the Releases page, open the DMG and drag Notcholino to Applications. Then follow the first launch guide below: macOS will block the app the first time.

With Homebrew, one command (it also skips the first-launch warning):

brew install --cask Peppe37/tap/notcholino

Prefer building it yourself? Install xcodegen, run xcodegen generate and open Notcholino.xcodeproj. See the README.

First launch: allowing the app

Notcholino is not notarized by Apple yet (that requires a paid developer account), so macOS shows a warning saying it cannot verify the app. This is expected. Here is how to open it:

Open Notcholino from Applications. A message says it could not be opened. Click Done (do not click “Move to Trash”).
Open System Settings → Privacy & Security.
Scroll down to the Security section. You will see “Notcholino.app was blocked”. Click Open Anyway.
Confirm with your password or Touch ID, then click Open. You only need to do this once.

Prefer the Terminal? This removes the quarantine flag and does the same thing:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Notcholino.app

Volume and brightness: to show them only in the notch, allow Notcholino in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. It is optional: without it, macOS shows its own HUD too.

Why trust it? Notcholino is fully open source: you can read every line of code in the repository, or build the app yourself with Xcode and skip this warning altogether. The release is built automatically by GitHub Actions from the tagged source.

Questions

macOS says it can't verify the app

That is normal for the alpha: follow the first launch guide. It takes four clicks, once.

It asks for permissions again after an update

Before 0.6.1 each update was signed with a different one-off signature, and macOS ties permissions to the signature. From 0.6.1 on, releases use one fixed certificate: you will be asked one last time when you update to it, and not again after that.

The macOS volume HUD still shows

Allow Notcholino in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, or click Authorize in Settings → Sound. If it looks switched on there but the HUD still shows, it is a leftover entry from a previous version: click Authorize in Notcholino and it clears it and asks again.

Spotify Like doesn't work

Click Connect next to the controls or in Settings → Now Playing and log in to Spotify. If it says your account is not allowed, open an issue to be added.

YouTube or Netflix doesn't show up

Notcholino shows what macOS lists as playing in Control Center. If the site or app isn't there, it doesn't report to the system. Check that Settings → Now Playing → Detect any app is on.

What does it do with my data?

Nothing leaves your Mac: no analytics, no telemetry, no accounts. It only contacts Spotify (if you connect it, and for cover art) and GitHub (plugins and the latest release). The Spotify token stays in your Keychain.

Is it really free?

Yes. It is free and open source under the GPL-3.0: you can use, study, modify and share it. If you share a modified version, it has to stay under the same license, with its source available.

Support & community

Notcholino is a free project made by one person. Here is how to get help, and how you can help it grow.

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