The MacBook notch, made useful. What's playing, internet speed and which programs used your data, battery, power draw, temperatures, processor, memory, storage, AI token spend, timers, focus, AirPods, and a live dot the moment anything opens your microphone or camera. Native Swift. No account, no telemetry, no network except album art. GPL v3.
Install
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/HashNotch.app"- Open the image, drag HashNotch to Applications, run that line once.
- It is ad-hoc signed and not notarised — no paid Apple account — so Gatekeeper refuses it until that label is gone. The command deletes the one hidden "downloaded" label on this app and nothing else.
- Without the terminal: right-click the app → Open, or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
- Check what you downloaded:
shasum -a 256 HashNotch-1.5.0.dmg→064ba3e8946f252140c891b01769f755b424c4ada7ed72e660aa49df0492acd8
New: power consumption
- Whole-Mac draw in watts, beside the battery.
- Read from the System Management Controller once a second, so it means the same on battery or charger.
- Red at 90% of the charger's rating — where the battery starts making up the difference.
- Never red on battery. Reads nothing while the panel is shut. No permission.
The panel
- Scrolls when there are more indicators than room, with a soft fade and no scroll bar.
- Stops above the Dock instead of drawing over it.
- Opens on its first row, every time.
- Two-finger swipe scrolls the rows; a swipe up on the notch still closes it.
- Scrolling is half the distance of anywhere else on the Mac, so a flick doesn't fly to the end.
- The window no longer resizes while the panel is open — no dip, no gap at the top of the screen.
- Rows slide to their new places when something grows or shrinks; nothing is rebuilt mid-move.
- Figures stay in their rows while the panel changes height, whatever caused it.
- Liquid Glass on macOS 26 and 27, following the system's transparency and Reduce Transparency.
- On macOS 12 the panel is the size of its rows and scrolls, instead of a full-height box with the rest cut off.
Colour
- One warning colour: red, at 90%, for processor, memory and disk.
- No amber step in between — next to an orange or yellow accent it read as the accent, not as a warning.
- Temperatures red at 80°C, figure and thermometer.
- Battery red at 10%, with no orange at 20%. The low-battery alert matches.
Focus
- One row: mark, name, the week's sentence, and a tinted "▶ 25 min" button.
- The row stays put while a stretch runs; only the button goes and the timer appears below.
- A running stretch takes the strip from music — the song is the background to it.
- The settings show their numbers again: each length, and the rounds before a long rest.
- The clock ticks once a minute when nothing is running, instead of once a second all day.
Rows, tightened
- Storage: what's free and how full share one line above the bar.
- AirPods: "L 95% R 94%" on one line, case included when docked, red at 10%.
- Internet, processor and memory graphs are 16 points tall instead of 26.
- A new AirPods mark — each bud one continuous outline, stems that stay apart at panel size.
Now playing
- A playing song stays on the notch: three ways it could vanish are closed.
- A player that reports no play speed is no longer read as paused.
- At a song change, the player keeps the notch while macOS says it owns the session.
- The progress bar and volume fill wear your accent colour; buttons stay white.
- The cover sits inside the strip with even margins, no shadow, corners sharing one centre.
Settings
- Opens beside the panel, down to 360 points wide, instead of over the readouts you came to change.
- Tabs: the page you're on is named, the rest are icons with tooltips.
- No more freezing when you switch tabs.
- A cleaner General page, grouped: Alerts, Counting, Cover art, Permissions.
- One sentence per setting, and macOS switches instead of checkboxes.
- The Alerts tab is gone — its one slider lives on General.
- The Agents page is gone; the panel still offers to update the notch hook when it falls behind.
- Confirming a reset no longer cuts its own label short.
- The privacy page says in full what the app writes, naming the one file that isn't its own.
Cost, measured on an M2
- Idle with the strip showing: 1.2% of one core. Asleep: nothing.
- Open panel, nine indicators: about a fifth of a core — half that on Calm, which now stops the figures rolling.
- The microphone and camera check (5.6 ms, every two seconds) moved off the drawing thread.
- Memory settles around 95 MB.
1162 automated checks run before every push. Every commit is signed. Nothing leaves your Mac.