Islet

iPhone's Dynamic Island, brought to your Mac's notch

Mac

Productivity

Menu Bar Apps

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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?

Congrats on the launch! Turning the notch from a thing people complain about into the useful bit 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?

The spring-physics expand/collapse is what separates this from every menu bar utility that just reserves the notch — you can feel the difference immediately. Curious about the file tray: when I drop something in, does it persist between sessions or is it a quick-transfer scratchpad that clears on reboot? I do a lot of screen recording setups where I need to stage a handful of assets before recording, and a persistent tray I don't have to refill every time would change how I use it.

the isolate-the-blast-radius approach to the private APIs is reassuring, and the boringnotch comparison answer was honest too. one thing I'm curious about that hasn't come up - the encrypted clipboard history feature, what's actually being protected against there? is the encryption mainly for at-rest storage on disk in case someone else has access to the machine, or does it also mean Islet itself can't read back old clipboard entries without you unlocking something? asking because clipboard history is exactly the kind of feature that quietly becomes a liability if it's just sitting in a plaintext sqlite file somewhere

@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.

Interesting launch! Everyone fixates on the spring, but catching a brightness change on macOS is the real headache since there's no clean public event to subscribe to. Did you guys land on polling the IOKit display values? Or did you find a notification that fires reliably?

Huge congrats to the launch! The animations look super smooth. Transitioning the Dynamic Island feel to macOS without making it feel unnatural is no easy task. Will definitely try it out!

That distinction between the concept being easy and the physics feel being the actual hard part rings true, since a notch expand collapse that's even slightly off in timing or easing reads as fake immediately, the same way people can tell a laggy or overshooting animation apart from a native one without being able to say exactly why. Curious what ended up being the trickiest part to match, was it more about matching Apple's actual spring constants and damping, or was it more about getting the trigger conditions right, like exactly when it should expand versus stay collapsed during things like fullscreen apps or multiple displays. Also, built natively in Swift and AppKit rather than Electron is a good call for something meant to feel like system chrome, but that also means every macOS point release is a real risk to something reaching into that specific notch area. How much of Islet's behavior depends on private or undocumented APIs versus fully public ones, since that's usually the thing that quietly breaks a utility like this after an OS update.

these notch utilities always make me nervous about the next macOS point release. Apple's changed how the notch/camera housing area behaves at the API level before without much warning. is this drawing into a stable public area (menu bar extra, NSStatusItem territory) or is it doing something closer to overlaying private window layers that could just break on the next update?