Launched this week
Islet
iPhone's Dynamic Island, brought to your Mac's notch
148 followers
iPhone's Dynamic Island, brought to your Mac's notch
148 followers
Most notch utilities just draw a static shape over the cutout. Islet actually behaves like iPhone's Dynamic Island: native spring-physics expand/collapse, real-time HUDs for volume and brightness, a live music glance with full playback controls, one-tap audio output switching (no System Settings detour), plus calendar, weather, and a file tray you can drop into from anywhere. Built natively in Swift + AppKit, not Electron, fast and fullscreen-aware.
Islet
@mrbrjan Thanks! We share some overlap (music controls, calendar, HUD replacements, file shelf), but a few things Islet does differently:
- Live Activities incl. a Meeting HUD — call timer + system-wide mic mute for Zoom/Teams
- Encrypted Clipboard History
- Custom Timer/Pomodoro you can create yourself
- Automatic updates (no manual re-downloads)
- Configurable Weather widget (compact/large)
- Audio output switcher (quick device switching, not just a volume HUD)
- Quick Notes with Obsidian export coming up too, for capturing stuff on the fly
Would love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think — feedback's very welcome!
@lippi304 thanks, I would also like to ask: did you develop this from scratch, or is it based on an existing open-source codebase?
Islet
@mrbrjan Built from scratch own Swift/SwiftUI codebase and window architecture, no shared/forked base with any other notch app. That said, I did take UX inspiration from a few apps for specific features (e.g. Droppy's onboarding flow and destination-picker pattern, Ice's menu bar overflow concept) just borrowing ideas, not code, same as most apps in this space do from each other.
@lippi304 good to hear it's scoped to just the one feature, that's a sane tradeoff. plain NSPanel for the main overlay means the core experience survives even in a worst case, and CGSSpace breaking would be an annoying but contained regression rather than the whole app going down. appreciate the honesty about tracking betas instead of pretending it's a non-issue.
Islet
@omri_ben_shoham1 Appreciate that that's exactly the mindset with private APIs, isolate the blast radius and stay honest about it.
The temp scratchpad actually makes sense as a default — I wouldn’t want old assets from a prior session cluttering things. The persistent shelf is what I’d want for this workflow though: I often prep the same set of assets across a series of recordings and re-dragging each session adds friction. Good to know the current behavior is by design. Worth +1-ing if you decide to add shelf persistence later — the recording-setup use case is real.
Islet
@leo404 Noted — that's a second vote for the same thing, and coming from two different workflows (yours and the recording-setup one) is a better signal than either alone. Not committing to it yet, but it's now an actual backlog candidate instead of a hypothetical.
Congrats on the launch! Turning the notch from the thing everyone complains about into the useful part of the screen is a lovely flip. What was the first thing you tried putting up there that turned out to be a bad idea?
Islet
@hannesh Thanks a lot, means a lot! Yeah that was the whole goal, wanted it to feel like it belongs on macOS, not bolted on. Let me know what you think once you've tried it!