This App Brings the IPhone’s Dynamic Island to Your Mac
I really like the iPhone’s Dynamic Island , the pill-shaped cutout at the top of the device’s screen. It’s an aesthetically pleasing way to check your battery percentage, record voice memos, and control music playback, among other things. Since many MacBooks also have a cutout in their display, you can use an app to bring the Dynamic Island to your laptop. This makes the cutout feel like a useful design feature rather than a jarring break in the screen, and some apps even let you move the giant volume and brightness control pop-ups onto the Dynamic Island.
Alcove is a Dynamic Island for your Mac
I’ve used Alcove on a MacBook without a notch, and I still find it quite useful. The developer of this app is known to be design-focused, much like they did with Klack, the app that makes your Mac’s keyboard sound vintage . Alcove’s neat status updates highlight useful information in a sleek interface. It takes your Mac’s volume and brightness control pop-ups and moves them into the notch. It’s a better implementation than Apple’s giant pop-ups that temporarily obscure a significant portion of the screen, a problem they’ve since fixed in iOS.
You can also use Alcove to save your Focuses tab, make changes to songs, and access playback controls. The app can even display some of these changes on your Mac’s lock screen. I also like the app’s animations, from the little visualizer that appears when music is playing to the different themes for the brightness and volume sliders. If you choose the Glow theme for the volume slider, the slider will change from green to red when the volume exceeds 80%.
This app supports gestures, so you can use horizontal swipes with two fingers on your MacBook to skip to the next song or go back to the previous one. You can use vertical swipes to expand playback controls or close live actions that appear in the notch.
You can try out all the features of the app for a couple of days without paying, and after the free trial ends, you’ll have to pay $17 to continue using the app. The price may be a bit steep for someone who only wants music playback controls and nothing more, but Alcove is one of the few apps that actually recreates the iPhone’s Dynamic Island on your Mac, right down to all the adorable animations.
Other useful Notch apps
There are many other apps that make good use of the MacBook’s notch, but here are my favorites:
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Notchnook ($25): This is another well-designed app that offers a few more features than Alcove, and it costs a little more. You get more widgets, shortcuts, and even a mirror that lets you check your frame before a video call. Notchnook’s file tray lets you quickly AirDrop files or save them to a temporary shelf, making it easy to move files around.
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Mediamate (€7): You can use this music control app to reduce the bulky brightness and volume controls, and choose where to place those control sliders . You can put them in the notch, or use thinner sliders in the middle of the screen.
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Tuneful ($4): This is a music-focused app for the notch that lets you connect to both Apple Music and Spotify. You can use it to display playback controls and the currently playing song in the notch, but it also includes gesture-based playback controls. If you don’t want it in the notch, you can enable its mini player to display album art and playback controls in other areas of the display.