Changelog

AloeNotch is actively developed. Here's what's changed.

0.15.2 — October 21, 2026

• The live equalizer does less work while music plays: it only redraws when a bar actually moves.

0.15.1 — October 21, 2026

• The Motion picker in Settings → Appearance fits inside its card again, instead of Lively hanging over the edge.

0.15.0 — October 19, 2026

• Mirror. A new tab with your camera in it, for a quick look before a call. The camera runs only while the tab is open, nothing is recorded, and it asks for camera access the first time you open it. Off by default: turn it on in Settings → Modules → Tools.
• Notes. A scratchpad tab that saves as you type and is still there tomorrow. It lives in one file on your Mac, never synced or sent anywhere, and the trash button deletes it. Also off by default, in the same place.
• The custom color in Settings → Appearance → Accent is a swatch like the others again, instead of a wide button covering the last one.

0.14.4 — October 14, 2026

• Two displays, no dead zone. With the notch on every display, an invisible area around each one swallowed clicks, so a window or Settings under the top of the screen couldn't be clicked or moved. Clicks outside the notch now go where you aim them.
• No more flashing on two displays. The notches on each screen could pass keyboard focus back and forth many times a second, flickering the notch and catching the pointer. A closed notch no longer takes focus at all.
• A new layout: Two pages. Home puts the large Now Playing player beside your week; Tools gives the shelf, clipboard and timer the whole panel. Switch from beside the clock or with a two-finger swipe, and a file dragged in goes straight to Tools. Pick it in Settings → Appearance → Layout.
• The large player shows the current lyric line when Lyrics is on.

0.14.3 — October 14, 2026

• Your keyboard and mouse stay yours. After a click in the notch, typing could go to the notch instead of the app in front, so every key beeped, and dragging a file off the shelf could leave the pointer stuck mid-drag. The notch now hands focus straight back, and never while a mouse button is held.

0.14.2 — October 13, 2026

• No more keyboard backlight readout. The light sensor adjusts the keyboard backlight on its own, and the notch kept announcing it even after 0.14.1. It's gone entirely, so the notch no longer watches the keyboard backlight at all. Volume, brightness and Caps Lock are unchanged.

0.14.1 — October 7, 2026

• The keyboard backlight stays quiet. With automatic keyboard brightness on, the light sensor adjusts the backlight by tiny amounts several times a second, and 0.14.0 announced every one of them in the notch. Now it shows only when you change the backlight yourself.

0.14.0 — October 7, 2026

• Shuffle and repeat. Both sit beside the play controls. Optionally, a new song's cover slides out of the notch for a moment when the track changes.
• Small things, announced. Caps Lock, microphone mute, the keyboard backlight, low battery and Low Power Mode each get a brief note in the notch, drawn like the volume display.
• Stopwatch and focus sessions. The timer has three modes now, and several running things can share the notch instead of the newest replacing the rest. Your next event can count down for its last ten minutes, if you turn that on.
• A clipboard you can pin and search. Pin up to six entries, search everything you copied, and keep formatting when you copy back (⌥-click for plain text). History, pins included, still never touches the disk.
• Compress and convert from the shelf. Right-click a file to zip it, or an image to change its format. The result is written next to the original, and the original is left alone.
• The next line of lyrics. Click the lyric to see the line that's coming as well as the one being sung.
• The notch on every display (off by default). Each screen gets its own, and the panel opens on whichever one you're using.
• Out of the way when it should be. While an app is full screen, the pointer no longer opens the panel. Apps you choose in Settings → General get the same treatment even in a window. Esc closes the panel, and ⌃⌥N gives it keyboard focus.
• Updates in one click. AloeNotch now updates itself through Sparkle: see what changed, click Install, and it reopens on the new version. Every update is signed and checked before it opens. Nothing installs without your click.
• Motion, refined. The panel can change its mind halfway through opening or closing without a jump, ignores the pointer brushing past on its way to the menu bar, and closes without ever overshooting the notch.
• Easier to read and use. Text and icons follow Increase Contrast, modules show when they are loading or need a permission instead of sitting blank, and Settings is tidier and ready to be translated.

0.13.2 — October 5, 2026

• The notch stays centered. After sleep or a display change, macOS could nudge or narrow the notch's window, leaving the strip a little off the hardware notch with one side longer than the other. AloeNotch now snaps back into place on its own.

0.13.1 — October 5, 2026

• Catch up on what's new. Updating now shows everything added since 0.10, and the opt-in extras (the glass notch, lyrics, the live equalizer and AirPods battery) each have a switch right there, so you can try them without digging through Settings.
• Accurate privacy note. Settings → Access now lists lyrics alongside weather and update checks as the only things that go online.
• Small, consistent touches. The menu bar shows ⌘, for Settings and ⌘Q for Quit (and Quit is no longer red), the login setting has one name everywhere, and the app uses US spelling to match macOS.

0.13.0 — September 26, 2026

• A glass notch. Choose Glass in Settings → Appearance → Notch and the open panel frosts the desktop behind it into smoked glass. It picks up a thin, colour-shifting edge taken from the album art, which drifts slowly while music plays.
• Still invisible where it counts. A soft black patch covers just the camera, so the cutout never shows, and the notch is its usual black whenever it's closed.
• Glass details. The weather pill and album cover get a lit glass edge, and the progress bar glows in the artwork's colour. The Intensity setting controls the frost here too.
• Solid black stays the default, and Reduce Transparency always keeps the notch solid.

0.12.0 — September 24, 2026

• Lyrics in the notch. Turn on Lyrics and the line being sung sits under the track title, handing back to the artist between verses. Lyrics come from LRCLIB, a free lyrics database, and only the song’s name is sent.
• An equalizer that listens. Turn on Live equalizer and the little bars follow the actual music instead of a loop. The audio is measured, never recorded or kept, and only while the bars are on screen.
• AirPods battery. Turn on Headphone battery and the “connected” note shows how charged your AirPods or Beats are.
• Choose your screen. With more than one display, pick where the notch lives: your MacBook’s screen, the main display, or one you pin. Settings’ Display button now pins the screen your pointer is on.
• Better bug reports. If AloeNotch ever crashes, About → Diagnostic report copies the details for an issue. They stay on your Mac until you paste them somewhere.
• All three new extras are off until you turn them on, and the privacy policy now spells out each one.

0.11.1 — September 24, 2026

• Opening is steady again. When the notch sprang open, everything inside slid in from the left and bounced along with the shape. Now the content holds still and the shape grows around it, so only the outline bounces.

0.11.0 — September 24, 2026

• Drag a file onto the notch and it opens. It used to wait for a hover that never came mid-drag. Now it opens straight away, leans toward the file as you bring it in, and gives a little gulp when you drop it on the shelf.
• More from the shelf. Click a file to Quick Look it, right-click for AirDrop, Show in Finder or Remove, or send everything at once with the new AirDrop button.
• A timer and your music, side by side. While a timer runs and something is playing, the timer pinches off into its own little bubble beside the notch instead of taking the strip over.
• Swipe on the notch. Two fingers down to open, up to close. Left or right skips tracks on the music strip, and switches sections in the open panel.
• Private while you share your screen. While your microphone is in use, clipboard history shows only what kind of thing each entry is, never its contents. There's also a new option to hide the notch from screenshots and screen sharing entirely (Settings → General → Screen sharing), though some capture apps ignore it.
• Long track titles scroll. Hover over a title that doesn't fit and it scrolls once to show the rest.
• Works with VoiceOver. Everything in the panel has a proper label, and volume, brightness, timers and devices are announced as they appear.
• Smoother and more consistent. Announcements fade in out of a soft blur, and text sizes and shades now follow one scale across the whole panel.

0.10.0 — September 24, 2026

• Join your next call from the notch. Calendar events with a Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, FaceTime, Slack, Chime, GoTo, Jitsi or Whereby link get a Join button from ten minutes before they start. Zoom links open straight in the Zoom app when it's installed.
• The notch pours out of the bezel. When it opens, its top corners now curve outward into the menu bar instead of hanging off it like a separate box.
• Choose how it opens. Settings → General → Open on: Hover (a short pause so passing the cursor through doesn't set it off, with a small swell so you can tell it noticed), Instant, or Click.
• Volume and brightness push back. Pressing past 0 or 100 stretches the bar and springs it back, so you can feel the limit.
• Skipping tracks moves. Artwork slides the way you skipped, and the new title fades up in place.
• Quieter in the background. Brightness is checked far less often when nothing is changing, roughly halving how often AloeNotch wakes your Mac while idle.

0.9.2 — September 22, 2026

• Choose how much the notch bounces. Settings → Appearance → Motion. Calm lands flat, Lively overshoots the way the paid apps do, and Standard is exactly what you had before. There's a custom slider underneath if you want the value in between.
• Closing still never bounces, on purpose. A spring that overshoots also undershoots, so on the way in the collapsed strip would briefly be smaller than the hardware notch and you'd see wallpaper around a shape that's meant to be invisible. Opening overshoots outward, where there's room.
• Colour the volume and brightness bars. White as before, or follow your accent, or pick each one separately — or let them take the colour of whatever's playing, which is the same colour the ambient glow is already using.
• Reduce Motion always wins. If it's on in System Settings, bounce is zero no matter what you've chosen here. A system-level request for less movement isn't a preference the app gets to overrule.

0.9.1 — September 10, 2026

• The weather pill opens a forecast. Click it in the panel header and the next six hours slide in — time, conditions and temperature. Nothing changes at rest, and it stays a plain readout if the forecast can't be reached.

0.9.0 — September 9, 2026

• Open it without the mouse. ⌃⌥N opens and closes the panel from anywhere, and it stays open until you press it again. Hovering was the only way in before, which is a real gap rather than a missing convenience — the shortcut needs no Accessibility permission, and you can change or switch it off in Settings → General.
• A timer in the notch. Start one from the panel and it takes over the collapsed strip while it counts down, with a ring that goes orange for the last ten seconds. Pause it, add a minute, or let it ring.
• Your last 24 copies. Click one to copy it again. The history is kept in memory only — never written to disk, cleared when AloeNotch quits, and anything a password manager marks as private is skipped outright.
• Switch where sound goes. When more than one output is available, a speaker button appears in the panel header. Pick a device and everything follows.
• Keep this Mac awake. One tap in the header holds off display sleep, another lets go. It releases itself if AloeNotch ever stops running.
• It notices more. Headphones connecting and drives mounting or ejecting now get the same brief announcement that volume and charging already had.
• Settings, rebuilt. Grouped so related things sit together, aligned on one grid, and animated — panes slide in from the side you clicked. Modules is three named groups now instead of one long list.
• Fixed: a wide, empty strip. After a volume or brightness readout the notch could stay stretched wide with nothing in it, and the playback visualizer would disappear. Every state change was landing one step behind.

0.8.5 — August 14, 2026

• A calmer way to lay out the panel. Settings → Appearance → Layout now offers One at a time: a single module filling the panel, with pills to switch between them. Bigger artwork, transport controls you don't have to aim at, a scrubber showing time remaining, and three upcoming events instead of one truncated line.
• Your panel is unchanged unless you ask. The existing side-by-side layout is still the default — this is a choice, not a replacement. Seeing everything at once and seeing one thing clearly are both reasonable things to want.

0.8.4 — August 14, 2026

• AloeNotch now tells you when there's a new version. It checks once a day and, if something newer exists, shows it in the menu bar and in Settings → About. It never interrupts you, and there's a switch to turn it off.
• This is the first release that can tell you about the next one — so from here on you won't have to remember to come back and look.

0.8.3 — August 14, 2026

• The panel opens as one object. The notch now grows first and its contents follow a beat behind, cascading in rather than appearing all at once. Closing does the same in reverse, so nothing pops.
• Softer corners. The panel's curves are continuous now, matching the way macOS draws its own rounded shapes — no more slight pinch where the curve meets the straight edge.
• Easier to read. A proper type scale replaces the dozen slightly-different text sizes that had accumulated, with nothing smaller than 10pt. Spacing follows a consistent rhythm.
• More room. The default panel is wider, so the columns aren't fighting for space. If you've already set your own width, yours is kept — widen it in Settings → General if things feel tight.
• The clock now rolls over to the next minute instead of blinking.

0.8.2 — August 10, 2026

• Permissions stay granted from now on. Every previous release was signed in a way that made macOS treat each update as a brand-new app, so Calendar, Location and Accessibility were quietly forgotten every time you updated. That's fixed. You'll need to grant them once more after installing this version — the last time.
• Fixed: Now Playing said "unavailable" even when music was playing. AloeNotch was checking whether its media helper worked using a command that could never succeed, so it disabled itself unnecessarily.
• Fixed: the Calendar and Location buttons did nothing. The app was missing two entitlements it needed to ask for those, and macOS refuses such requests silently — no prompt, no error.
• Plugging in the charger now shows a brief bolt and your charge level in the notch.
• Volume and brightness steps tap the trackpad, the shelf opens to catch a dragged file, and the equalizer settles when playback pauses.

0.8.1 — July 31, 2026

• Fixed: the Calendar and Location buttons didn't do anything. Granting either from Settings or during setup now works. If you tried in 0.8.0 and nothing happened, this was why.
• Granting access now takes effect straight away — your next event and the weather appear without restarting AloeNotch.
• When a permission has already been denied, AloeNotch says so and points at System Settings, rather than offering a button macOS will ignore.

0.8.0 — July 29, 2026

• The panel moves as one piece. Album artwork now travels out of the notch and grows into the panel as you hover, instead of the small and large versions swapping over.
• No more stutter when you skip a track. Cover art is decoded off the main thread now — it used to take roughly three quarters of a frame at exactly the moment the artwork was trying to crossfade.
• A real Settings window. Five tabs — General, Modules, Appearance, Access and About — with an accent colour, panel width, glass intensity and animation speed. Every module can be switched on or off individually, including battery, which previously couldn't.
• It responds to you. Hover and press feedback across the panel, the shelf opens to catch a dragged file, and the trackpad taps on drop and on each volume or brightness step.
• A proper introduction. First launch is now a short animated walkthrough that demonstrates the hover gesture — with a pointer that moves — and asks for permissions in context, explaining what each one is for.
• Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency are respected throughout, and take effect immediately without a relaunch.
• The equalizer settles when playback pauses instead of bouncing regardless, and the panel no longer stops responding to the pointer while it's still visibly open.

0.7.0 — July 27, 2026

• Liquid Glass throughout. The welcome screen, the menu bar panel and the Settings window are now translucent — your desktop shows through, frosted, instead of a flat grey slab.
• Glass is optional. Some wallpapers make translucent panels hard to read, so there's a switch — offered during onboarding and in Settings — that turns everything back to solid.
• Settings is now tabbed. Features, Position, General and About, behind a floating glass tab bar. Everything used to live in one long scroll where half of it sat below the fold.
• A rebuilt welcome screen with a looping animation of the notch opening, so the hover gesture is obvious before you've tried it.
• Ambient Glow now lights up in step with the panel instead of arriving a beat late — the artwork's color lands as the panel finishes opening.
• Requires macOS 26, and Apple Silicon. Liquid Glass is a macOS 26 API, so this release raises the minimum, and the build is now Apple Silicon only. 0.6.0 is the final release for Intel Macs and macOS 15 — still downloadable and still working, but frozen.

0.6.0 — July 20, 2026

• Volume and brightness, in the notch. Tap the volume or brightness keys and the readout appears in the notch — icon and level bar — instead of the big grey square in the middle of your screen.
• It genuinely replaces the macOS HUD rather than doubling up. That needs Accessibility access so AloeNotch can catch the keys first; until you grant it, macOS's own HUD is left alone and Settings shows a one-tap prompt.
• Smoother open and close. Retuned the animation and removed an expensive per-frame blur, so the panel settles cleanly.
• Fixed the panel briefly ghosting outside the notch while closing.

0.5.0 — July 20, 2026

• A glance at what's playing. While music is playing, the notch quietly grows a little on each side to show the album artwork and a small animated equalizer — tinted with the artwork's own color.
• Still invisible when idle. The moment playback stops, it shrinks back to hugging the notch exactly, so there's nothing to see until there's something to say.
• Hovering the peeked-out glyph opens the full panel, same as the notch.

0.4.0 — July 20, 2026

• A proper welcome. AloeNotch is invisible until you hover it — so first launch now introduces itself, with a looping animation that shows you the gesture. No more wondering whether it installed.
• Permissions, in context. Calendar and location access are now requested after the welcome instead of the instant you launch, so you know what you're saying yes to.
• Set up launch-at-login right from the welcome, and re-open it anytime from Settings → General.

0.3.0 — July 19, 2026

• Redesigned panel. A cleaner, more horizontal layout — now playing, a calendar week strip, and the shelf sit side by side.
• Calendar week strip. The month plus a 7-day view centered on today (today highlighted), with your next event beneath it.
• Richer Now Playing. Bigger album art with a badge showing which app the audio is coming from.
• Settings in the panel. A gear in the corner opens preferences directly — no digging through the menu bar.

0.2.0 — July 19, 2026

• Song scrubber. Now Playing shows a live progress bar with elapsed / total time — drag it to seek.
• The shelf remembers. Staged files now persist across launches, and a new Drag all handle pulls every file out at once.
• Settings window. A proper preferences window: toggle each module, launch at login, and nudge the panel's horizontal position.
• Tighter layout. The expanded panel is more compact and better spaced for the content it holds.

0.1.0 — July 17, 2026

• First release: a Dynamic Island-style panel that hugs the MacBook notch and expands on hover.
• Now Playing from any app — Apple Music, Spotify, and even YouTube in a browser — with transport controls and an ambient glow drawn from the artwork's color.
• Drop shelf for staging files, plus calendar, weather, battery, and a live clock at a glance.
• Menu-bar switchboard to show or hide each module.

Follow along or file ideas on GitHub.