OreoNotch: the notch is a UI surface

Problem

Every MacBook made since 2021 has a notch, and the operating system treats it as an obstacle to route the menu bar around. The two apps that already saw it as a surface split the idea in half: one does live activities well, the other does a drawer of widgets well, and running both is two menu-bar items and two settings windows to hold the same piece of screen.

OreoNotch takes the whole surface. Live activities appear as they happen, now playing, AirPods battery, Do Not Disturb, a screenshot you can drag straight out, and one click opens a Desk with media, to-dos, what is next in the calendar, a timer and volume. The hard part is not the feature list. It is that the notch is a region of the screen with no window of its own, and everything you draw there is a transparent panel sitting on top of other people’s apps.

Decisions

The state machine has no AppKit in it. The panel has more states than it looks like: closed, hinting, an activity showing, the drawer open on a tab, and every gesture and timer that moves between them. So that logic lives in a module that imports no AppKit and does no I/O, as a pure function, with the coordinator taking an injected clock. Both are then testable without a screen, which is the only reason 52 tests can cover the behaviour of a thing that exists to be hovered.

Visible is not clickable, and it cost me a day to learn. Returning nil from a view’s hit test stops the view handling a click, but the window has already taken the event from the WindowServer, so it does not fall through to whatever is underneath. A 900 by 420 transparent panel pinned to the top of the screen made System Settings completely unclickable, and it went unnoticed because screenshots showed the other app perfectly visible around the panel. The fix is to size the window to what it actually draws instead of gating the hit test. The habit is worth more than the fix: for anything that floats, the test is whether the app underneath still responds, never whether it still renders.

Hooks so the surface can be photographed without hands. A notch app has nothing you can screenshot without hovering, dragging and waiting, which makes every marketing shot and every visual check a manual act. So the app takes environment variables at launch: jump straight to a settings pane, jump to an onboarding step, hold one activity open indefinitely, open the drawer, open the tray, fill the tray without a drag, skip Bluetooth entirely, write diagnostics to a temp file. A script drives the whole surface. Same reason as Slate’s render sweep: the verification has to be cheaper than the change, or it stops happening.

Two toolchains over one set of sources. SwiftPM owns the libraries and the tests, so the inner loop is a fast build with no Xcode in it. Xcode builds the shipping app, because the Focus filter is an App Intent and that metadata only exists in an Xcode build. Rather than pick one and lose either the fast loop or the shipping feature, the project generates its Xcode project from a manifest and keeps both. The cost is a rule to remember, which is written at the top of the readme: after adding a source file, regenerate, or Xcode cannot see it.

Always launch it the way a user would. Running the executable directly bypasses LaunchServices, so the privacy system cannot resolve the bundle’s Info.plist and the app aborts on the first privacy-sensitive call, even though every usage-description key is present. Nothing in the error says so. It is now the loudest warning in the readme, because the version of this bug that reaches a user is an app that dies on first launch for reasons no log explains.

Named so the name is cheap to change. Oreo is my rabbit, which is a fine story for an about box and a poor defence against a biscuit company. So every identifier is name-neutral: the bundle id, the CloudKit container and the preference domain all say notch rather than the brand. A rename now costs strings and assets, not a signing identity and a migration. The icon went the same way. I rendered four rabbit directions side by side, decided they all read as a primitive-shapes animal, and shipped the notch silhouette instead. The rabbit lives in the about box.

Outcome

OreoNotch is live at 0.2.0, notarised, macOS 15 and Apple Silicon only, free to download with a $12.99 licence, updating itself through its own Sparkle feed. It is an accessory app with no Dock icon, and the menu it does have includes a debug submenu that fires synthetic activities, because the alternative is waiting for a real AirPods battery event to test the AirPods battery view.

Apple Silicon only and macOS 15 only were both deliberate. The notch exists on exactly those machines, and supporting older systems would have meant conditional paths through the one part of the app that has to be pixel-exact. Cutting the audience to the machines the product is actually for is the cheapest performance and correctness decision available, and the one people are most reluctant to make.