QuickNotch

A floating notch and app dock for Windows and macOS. Hover the pill at the top of your screen and it opens into a dock of pinned apps; scroll and it turns into pages for your machine, the sky, your day and your music. Free, MIT licensed, no account, no telemetry.

Download · Website · Changelog · Releases · Report a bug

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What it does

QuickNotch is one small pill pinned to the top-centre of the screen. Hover it and a dock of pinned apps grows out of it, leaning toward the cursor so a click always lands where you expect. Scroll over it and the same island turns into another page — no window to arrange, no tab to find, nothing to dismiss.

State	What you get
Quickview (collapsed)	Date and time, weather, laptop and device battery, unread notifications. While music plays it becomes a vinyl disc with a marquee title and a live waveform.
Apps	Fisheye dock of pinned apps, one click to launch.
System	CPU, GPU, memory, storage, download and upload as live rings; click through to Task Manager or Activity Monitor.
Weather	Today plus a seven-day outlook, automatic by IP or pinned to a town you choose.
Calendar	Google Calendar for the day, with the next event ticking along in the pill.
Music	Cover art, progress, transport and volume — Windows media sessions, or MediaRemote on macOS.
Gaming (Windows)	A fullscreen game replaces the pill with FPS, CPU, GPU, ping and download; each cell can be switched off.

The notch sits flush above the menu bar on macOS and above fullscreen games on Windows, and it stays quiet: the Dock icon (on macOS) and taskbar presence appear only while Settings is open.

Install

Grab the installer for your machine from quicknotch.app/download or the latest release:

Platform	File
Windows 10 & 11 (x64)	.msi (or .exe)
macOS 12+ Apple silicon	-arm64.dmg
macOS 12+ Intel	-x64.dmg

First launch

The installers are not code-signed or notarized yet, so the operating system will warn once. The app is open source, and every release publishes SHA256SUMS.txt; download only from quicknotch.app or the GitHub releases page.

macOS

1. Open the .dmg and drag QuickNotch into Applications.
2. Open QuickNotch. If macOS says it cannot verify the app or that it is damaged, choose Done.
3. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security. Scroll to Security, click Open Anyway for QuickNotch, and confirm with your password or Touch ID.
4. If you prefer the right-click route: right-click QuickNotch in Applications, choose Open, then Open again.

Terminal alternative: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/QuickNotch.app. Use it only on an installer you downloaded from the official release.

Windows

1. Run the .msi or .exe installer.
2. If Microsoft Defender SmartScreen says Windows protected your PC, choose More info, then Run anyway.
3. Finish the installer.

Once installed, QuickNotch updates itself: it checks GitHub in the background and swaps in the next release after you press Restart & update in Settings → Changelog.

Build from source

You need JDK 17+. Everything else is downloaded by Gradle. macOS builds also compile the small Objective-C bridges (cc is part of the Xcode command-line tools).

git clone https://github.com/StarkDroid/QuickNotch.git
cd QuickNotch
./gradlew :composeApp:run                      # launch overlay + tray
./gradlew :composeApp:compileKotlinDesktop     # fast type check
./gradlew :composeApp:detekt                   # static analysis (must be green)
./gradlew :composeApp:packageDistributionForCurrentOS   # installer for this OS

On Windows use gradlew.bat. Installers land in composeApp/build/compose/binaries/main/ (.msi/.exe, or .dmg plus app/QuickNotch.app via :composeApp:createDistributable).

Calendar sign-in in a local build opens the production site by default. To use the local site, run npm run dev:oauth in web/, then start the app with QUICKNOTCH_WEB_BASE=http://localhost:5173 ./gradlew :composeApp:run.

Run the app with :composeApp:run, not java -jar. The plain jar has no manifest and the bridges are synced by the build.

Calendar sign-in needs a Google OAuth client, and this repository carries neither half of it: the client id names this project's client, the secret authenticates it. Official installers get both from CI. For a local build, put them in the ignored local.properties:

googleClientId=...apps.googleusercontent.com
googleClientSecret=GOCSPX-...

or export QUICKNOTCH_GOOGLE_CLIENT_ID and QUICKNOTCH_GOOGLE_CLIENT_SECRET before building. Everything else works without them; Calendar then reports that the build has no Google client. If you are forking, create your own client in the Google Cloud console and use its values.

The website has its own build entry at the repository root: npm run build installs and builds web/, and npx wrangler deploy publishes it to quicknotch.app. Those are the same two commands Cloudflare runs, so see web/README.md before changing either.

Project layout

composeApp/     Kotlin + Compose Multiplatform desktop app
  src/commonMain     pure Kotlin: calendar + weather APIs, strings, glyphs
  src/desktopMain    overlay, dock, widgets, media, system probes, settings
  native/            Win32 PowerShell bridges and macOS Objective-C bridges
web/            SvelteKit marketing site (static, prerendered, Cloudflare Workers)
docs/           banner sources for the README
config/         detekt configuration and baseline

The app is documented where it lives: main.kt for the process and window model, system/ for the per-platform probes, FloatingNotchOverlay for the overlay choreography, and the media, calendar and weather packages for the rest. The comments carry the reasons, including the traps that cost a day. Read those before changing anything under ui/ or system/.

How releases work

Every merged pull request that touches the app becomes a release. The workflow plans the next version from the PR's labels, builds the Windows installers and both macOS DMGs, then publishes them with SHA256SUMS.txt and a cumulative changelog.json — the same feed the app and the website changelog read.

Label	Bump
release:major, major, breaking	major
release:patch, patch, fix, bug	patch
anything else	minor

A PR that only touches web/, docs or CI merges without producing a build. Local builds report 2.0.0 unless CI passes the published number with -PappVersion=x.y.z.

Contributing

1. Branch from main, keep one logical change per commit, and sign your commits (git commit -S).
2. ./gradlew :composeApp:compileKotlinDesktop :composeApp:detekt must pass; run :composeApp:run and check the notch before you open the PR.
3. A feature ships on three surfaces — the overlay, the onboarding walkthrough and web/ — in the same pull request, all telling the same story.
4. Nothing is pushed for you: open the PR from your own fork or branch.

Issues and ideas are welcome at github.com/StarkDroid/QuickNotch/issues.

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE. Use it, fork it, ship your own notch.

QuickNotch is free and has no upsell. If it earns a place on your screen and you feel like saying thanks, buy me a coffee — it keeps the updates coming and unlocks nothing.