A Dynamic Island for your Mac. Media, calendar, a file shelf, a quick converter and live AI agent limits, all living in the notch. For free.
Works on MacBooks with a notch, and on Macs and monitors without one, where Islet shows a small floating pill instead. Any screen, same features.
Your MacBook's notch is dead space. Apple gave the iPhone the Dynamic Island, with music, live activities and little moments of delight, then gave the Mac a black cutout that does nothing. The notch apps that do exist are either paid, or pretty but thin.
Islet turns the notch into the most useful pixel real estate on your Mac. Hover over it and it opens into a smooth liquid-glass panel: your music, your calendar, a shelf that moves files around faster than Finder, and a converter that turns files into other files with one drop. Run Claude Code or Antigravity? Your live limits sit right there too. On an external monitor it appears as a floating pill, so it follows you to every screen.
Native Swift and SwiftUI. No Electron. No subscriptions, no account. Just download it and it works.
- 🎵 Media controls for everything. Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, any browser, any player. Artwork, play/pause/skip, drag-to-seek, and an output switcher to jump between AirPods and speakers. The closed notch shows tiny artwork with gentle level bars.
- 🤖 Live AI agent limits. Your Claude Code and Antigravity limits (5-hour and weekly, live, with reset times) right in the notch, so you know what's left before you start a session. See every running agent with its project, branch and state, and get a soft glow plus chime the moment one finishes and needs you, no more staring at the terminal. No other notch app does this. Not an agent user? It's a module like any other, flip it off in Settings.
- 📁 Shelf. Drag any file at the notch and it opens to catch it. Drag files back out into Finder, WhatsApp, mail, anywhere, with original names kept and multi-select working. Copied an image? One click pastes it onto the shelf.
- 📡 AirDrop from the notch. Drop a file on the AirDrop box and pick a nearby device. Done.
- 🔄 Quick Convert. Drop a file on the Convert box and choose: HEIC/PNG/JPG, images→PDF, PDF→images, merge PDFs, MOV↔MP4, shrink video to 720p, video→GIF, anything with sound→MP3, Word/RTF/TXT/HTML→PDF. Everything runs on your Mac, nothing is uploaded.
- 📷 Grab text from anything. Drop a screenshot, photo or PDF on Extract Text and the words land straight in your clipboard.
- 📅 Calendar. Today's events at a glance, a full month grid, and you choose which calendars show.
- 🎧 Little moments of delight. Connect your AirPods and a real rotating 3D model pops out of the notch with a battery ring. Charging, charged and low-battery pop-ups too.
- ⌨️ Option-Space opens and closes the notch from anywhere. Launch at login, menu-bar icon, optional Dock icon.
- 🎛️ Yours to shape. Every module can be switched off, animation feel and glass strength are sliders, and each display can have the notch on or off.
- 🪶 Featherweight. Idles near zero CPU at about 55 MB, event-driven everywhere. Buttery animations AND low usage, not either-or.
- 🆓 Free & open source (MIT).
Requires macOS 26 or newer on an Apple Silicon Mac.
- Download the latest Islet
.dmgfrom the Releases page. - Open the DMG and drag Islet into your Applications folder.
- Allow it through macOS security. Because the app is free and self-signed
(not a paid, Apple-notarized certificate), macOS blocks the first launch with a
"can't be opened" warning. To let it run:
- Double-click the app once, then close the warning.
- Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about Islet, and click Open Anyway, then Open to confirm.
- (On older macOS you can instead right-click the app → Open → Open.)
- Islet asks for permissions only as you use each part: Calendar access for the Calendar tab, Bluetooth for the AirPods pop-up. Say yes only to what you want.
- Done. Hover over the notch.
Using the Agents module? When you press Connect, macOS asks once for your password so Islet can read your Claude Code login from the keychain. That's just macOS being careful with keychain items. Type your password, choose Always Allow, and it never asks again. Your login never leaves your Mac except to fetch your own usage from Anthropic.
git clone https://github.com/MrRockySL/Islet.git
cd Islet/App
./build.sh
open "build/MacBook Notch.app"Islet is built entirely on native Apple frameworks, with no Electron, no helpers phoning home, no analytics.
- Media rides the MediaRemote now-playing stream, so it sees whatever is actually playing, event-driven with zero polling.
- Shelf files are references. Dragging a file in never copies or moves your original. Pasted images and converted files land in a stash folder you choose.
- Conversions use ImageIO, PDFKit, AVFoundation, CoreText and Vision, all on-device. MP3 comes from a bundled LAME encoder because macOS can decode MP3 but not write it.
- Agent limits are read with your own local logins and shown straight from the providers' usage endpoints. Live sessions are watched from local files, with zero network.
This is an open project and contributions are very welcome. Found a bug, have a feature idea, or want to improve something? Open an issue or send a pull request. Let's make it better together.
MIT, free to use and share.
Standing on great open work: MediaRemoteAdapter (BSD 3-Clause) for system-wide media, and LAME (LGPL-2.1) for MP3 encoding. Inspired by what Boring Notch and Alcove started.
Made by MrRockySL.