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Notch Island

A Dynamic Island for the MacBook notch, for whatever is playing. Artwork to the left of the camera housing, an animation to the right that tells you what kind of thing is playing, and a full mini player when you reach for it.

$ curl -fsSL https://theysap.com/install/notch-island | bash
or Download .dmg
Source

The notch becomes a media display

It works with anything that publishes now-playing information to macOS: Apple Music, Spotify, Podcasts, IINA, VLC, and anything playing in Safari, Chrome or Arc.

At rest, it sits in the menu bar strip: artwork on the left of the notch, an activity indicator on the right, and nothing at all when nothing is playing.

Hover the top of the screen and it opens into a mini player: artwork, title and artist, a draggable progress bar with elapsed and remaining time, and previous / play-pause / next. Long titles scroll. Playback that reports no duration, like live radio, gets a static bar rather than a progress bar implying a position that does not exist.

It knows what it is looking at

The right-hand animation differs by content type, so a glance tells you whether that sound is a song, a video, or someone talking.

music Equaliser bars, each driven by two sine waves of different frequency so they drift rather than march.
podcast A travelling waveform on a speech envelope, dropping close to silence between phrases.
video The real playback position, as a track with a lit head.

Requirements

macOS26 or later
chipApple silicon
displayA MacBook with a notch
licenceMIT. Free, and the source is on GitHub

Installing

One line. It checks this Mac can run Notch Island, verifies the download against the checksum published beside it, and puts the app in Applications.

$ curl -fsSL https://theysap.com/install/notch-island | bash

Installed this way, nothing is blocked on first launch: macOS attaches its quarantine flag to what a browser downloads, not to what curl fetches, so the app opens straight away. Do read it before piping it into a shell: that URL serves the script as plain text, and it is the same file that lives in the repository.

Or install it by hand

  1. Download the .dmg and open it.
  2. Drag NotchIsland into Applications.
  3. Open it from Applications, then follow the step below, once.

That first launch is blocked. Here is how to get past it

A .dmg downloaded in a browser carries the quarantine flag, so macOS will refuse to open what is inside it, with “Apple could not verify ‘NotchIsland’ is free of malware…”, offering only Done and Move to Bin.

To be plain about what that means: macOS is not reporting that it found anything. It is reporting that it cannot tell who built the app. Notch Island is ad-hoc signed and not notarised, because notarising requires a paid Apple Developer ID, so Gatekeeper refuses, exactly as designed.

  1. Double-click NotchIsland, and click Done on the warning.
  2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security and scroll down to Security. It now says “NotchIsland was blocked to protect your Mac.”
  3. Click Open Anyway, authenticate, and confirm.
Why this is safe to click past
  • The warning is about identity, not content. macOS is not saying it found anything in the app. It is saying it cannot tell who built it, because the build is not notarised, and notarisation needs a paid Apple Developer membership, not a different app.
  • The source is public and MIT licensed. Every line the app runs is in the repository, including the build script that produces the release.
  • Releases are built by GitHub Actions from that source, not uploaded from anyone’s laptop, and every .dmg ships with a SHA256SUMS.txt beside it. Run shasum -a 256 on your download and compare; the installer does exactly that before it puts anything in Applications.
  • It asks for almost nothing. No Accessibility, no Screen Recording, no Full Disk Access, and no access to your media files. It reaches the network only to check GitHub for releases and to load the cover art your player already published.
Being straight with you about the limit: the checksum proves your download is the file that was published, not who published it. Anyone able to publish a release to that repository could ship code to every install. That is true of any app distributed without notarisation, and it is the honest reason to read the source if it matters to you.

Or, in one line. This is exactly what those steps amount to, removing the quarantine flag macOS attached to the download:

$ xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/NotchIsland.app

This is a first-launch problem only. Updates installed from the app’s own menu are not blocked: the app is already trusted, and the updater clears the quarantine flag from the new copy before putting it in place. Every download is verified against the SHA256SUMS.txt published beside it in the release.

What it asks for

Everything here is optional. Refuse any of it and the app keeps working, with the specific feature it buys missing.

Automation → Music Artwork for tracks in your library, and where Music has actually got to after you drag its own scrubber. Without it, library tracks show the Music icon instead of a cover.
Login item Starts the app when you log in, if you turn on Launch at login. Without it, start it yourself.
  • No Accessibility. Nothing is clicked or typed on your behalf.
  • No Screen Recording. Nothing is captured.
  • No Full Disk Access, and no access to your media files.
  • No network access, except to GitHub, which it uses to check for releases and to fetch cover art from the URL the source app published for it. No analytics, no crash reporting, no account.