Isle

A Dynamic Island for the MacBook Pro notch. Invisible at rest; it grows out of the hardware cutout when something is happening, and opens into a full panel when the pointer arrives.

macOS 26+MacBook Pro notchIn development

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Platform: macOS 26 or later
Architecture: Apple Silicon
Hardware: MacBook with a camera housing
Idle CPU: 0.0% — event driven

Inside Isle

The real interface, running today.

Captured from the current development build—not a concept render.

Isle expanded from the MacBook notch to show device and audio output controls — Isle expanded from the hardware cutout into its devices and audio-output view.

Media

The one thing allowed to flank the cutout

Artwork on one side, a live visualiser on the other — the recognisable Island shape. Everything else grows downward onto a strip beneath the notch instead, because icons either side of the camera housing read as awkward rather than native.

Interface preview · media, flanking the cutout

Volume and brightness

A glowing bar, not a grey square in the middle of your screen

The island grows a little and emits a progress bar beneath the notch, replacing the system overlay that lands over whatever you were looking at.

Interface preview · the volume strip

Power and devices

Charging is a state, not a notification

While plugged in the island holds a steady bar with the charge level and the wattage the battery is actually accepting. Connected mice, keyboards and earbuds report their own levels, and audio output switches with one tap.

67% · 43W inMagic Mouse 88%AirPods 61 / 58

Interface preview · the devices tab

Using Isle

From first open to finished.

A practical walkthrough of the core workflow.

Install and launchIsle has no window and no Dock icon; it lives in the cutout.

Grant AccessibilityOnly needed to intercept the volume and brightness keys — there is no way around it on macOS.

Forget about it0.0% CPU at idle, because the motion lives in Core Animation rather than a timer.

Under the hood

It has to read as the cutout coming to life

Pure black, no rim, no border, no shadow, no colour tone — anything that reads as a window floating near the notch breaks the effect. The window is allocated once and never resizes; expanding is a layout change inside a fixed frame, because animating the window itself makes chrome and content interpolate on separate clocks.

Questions about Isle?

Feature requests and bug reports are genuinely welcome — most of what these apps do came from someone pointing out that the alternative was annoying.

hello@northing.dev