Two years ago I switched to an M1 Pro MacBook Pro, the first Mac with a notch. Honestly, my first thought was: that’s ugly. A black bite taken out of the top of the screen, right in the middle.
After a while I started thinking about it differently. The iPhone has a notch too, and Apple turned it into the Dynamic Island: something that used to be in the way became a place that moves and actually does things. So why not the notch on a Mac?
I wasn’t the first to think that. The most popular notch app back then looked great, and it was one of the first to do this at all. But it cost over twenty dollars. I hesitated, decided that was a lot to spend on a notch, and didn’t buy it. Later I heard it isn’t even sold anymore.
A year ago I tried building one myself with Claude. AI wasn’t as smart back then, and I got stuck halfway. I also wasn’t thinking about making an app other people could use. It was just for me, so I let it go.
This year was different. The idea came back, I tried again, and AI has gotten a lot better. This time I looked properly at the notch apps out there. The paid ones mostly cost somewhere between ten and twenty-something dollars. There are free, open-source ones too, with plenty of users, but some of them need you to type a command in Terminal before they’ll even open. I wanted one that just works after you install it, feels right in both English and Chinese, and is free. So I made it.
That’s KumoNotch. Kumo means “cloud” in Japanese.
What I actually use every day
Music controls. This is the one I wanted most. Whether it’s Apple Music, Spotify or a video in the browser, I move the pointer to the notch and pause, skip or scrub, without switching windows to find the player.
Calendar and Reminders. It connects straight to Apple’s own Calendar and Reminders. I see today and tomorrow at a glance, the notch drops down by itself five minutes before a meeting, and there’s a Join button next to the meeting link. It knows Feishu and Tencent Meeting too. I can tick off reminders right there.
A shelf for copy and paste. I used to use a clipboard app that was free to download, but unless you paid for it, every paste made you wait a moment. Now everything I copy sits on a shelf in the notch. One click copies it again, or I drag it into another app. I can drop files on the notch to park them for later, too.
Screenshots and screen recording. This is the one that annoyed me most. macOS makes you remember a pile of shortcuts, ⌘⇧3, ⌘⇧4, ⌘⇧5, and I always had to stop and think. Now it all lives in the notch: ⌃⌥S grabs an area, copies it and puts it on the shelf; ⌃⌥R starts and stops a recording, with a timer in the notch while it runs.
Somewhere along the way I realised the notch is exactly the right size for all of this. It’s already there at the top of the screen, one glance away, and when I’m done it tucks back in and covers nothing.
KumoNotch is free, and you can download it now. It’s not a big project. It’s just something I use every day and find useful and fun. If you have a Mac with a notch, give it a try. If anything feels off, tell me.