CreativeNotch v0.14.0

Early release, and a personal tool. It is ad-hoc signed, not
notarised, and installed by a shell script. Install it to watch the
project develop, not to replace a notch app you already rely on.

What is in it

The foundation and nine modules, every one of which can be switched
off in Settings — and switching one off stops what it runs, rather than
hiding it:

File shelf	Drag a file onto the notch to stash it, drag it out later; remove one, or clear all, from the panel
Media controls	Play, pause, and skip from the panel
Clipboard history	The last things you copied, with the time each was copied, gated on activity
Media metadata	Now-playing title, artist, artwork, and an ambient badge
Battery and power state	Level, charging state, Low Power Mode, and a gauge
Timer	A countdown, counting down beside the notch
Preferences	A settings window that stops a subsystem, not one that hides a feature
Global shortcut	Open the notch from anywhere, registered with the window server rather than a global monitor
Camera	A mirror under the lens, a shutter, and a record button
Capture indicator	A tell in the notch when another app is using your camera or microphone

The panel, redrawn

The open panel now opens into the notch rather than under it. The tabs
are icons in the left ear of the camera housing, the battery level and a
settings gear sit in the right ear, and nothing is drawn behind the
housing — the same rule every peek already followed. Music is a column
on the left with the cover, the track and the transport buttons; it
stays put when nothing is playing, so the tabs never move. Each pane has
a title row with a count and an action. One control vocabulary replaces
the system-blue buttons the timer used to wear, the battery tab draws a
real gauge, and a drag shows a dashed drop target instead of a bare label.

Nothing about it adds a timer or a redraw: the clipboard shows the clock
time an entry was copied rather than "2m ago", and the timer's progress
track moves only when its digits do. The closed notch, the peeks and the
badges are unchanged. Settings is a grouped form in five sections.

Launch at login

The last thing the roadmap was waiting on: a switch in Settings that
reads macOS rather than remembering an answer.
Turn the login item off in System Settings and the row shows it off,
because there is no stored flag left to disagree with the system.

It is not an eleventh entry in the table above and has no module
toggle, because it runs nothing — there would be nothing for the
toggle to stop. The switch also refuses to so much as ask unless the
app is running from /Applications: reading the login-item status
repoints the system's record at whichever copy did the reading, so a
build run from anywhere else would quietly steal the record from your
installed copy.

A registration is a database row, not a launch, and the two can
disagree. So it was not believed until a human logged out twice and
found the app already running.

The point of it

No subsystem runs when it isn't needed, and that rule is enforced
centrally rather than trusted to each module.

Hover uses a tracking area rather than a global mouse monitor. Screen
following listens for notifications rather than polling the cursor. The
clipboard poller and the media helper are suspended outright when nothing
is looking. That is what the project is for, and every module joins the
same gate.

The timer is the one documented exemption, and it is a split rather than
a hole: its redraws are gated, its deadline never is. A countdown
whose whole purpose is to fire while nobody is watching cannot be
suspended for not being watched.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/GcdZ03/CreativeNotch/main/Scripts/install.sh | bash

Re-run the same command to update.

Installing by hand

Download the .tar.gz below, then:

tar -xzf CreativeNotch-v0.14.0.tar.gz
mv CreativeNotch.app /Applications/
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/CreativeNotch.app

That last line matters. The app is ad-hoc signed, not
notarised, so a copy downloaded through a browser carries the
quarantine flag and macOS will refuse to open it. The installer
script avoids this entirely because curl never sets the flag.

Requires macOS 26 or later, on an Apple Silicon Mac — this
build is arm64 only, and the installer will say so rather than
leaving you with an app that cannot launch. A physical notch is
optional; notchless Macs get a pill under the menu bar.