Notchling

A little creature that lives in your MacBook notch

Mac

Design Tools

Productivity

Hey Product Hunt 👋 A few weeks ago I launched Crew here — little pixel monsters for your Claude Code agents (it finished #7 of the day, thank you!). Notchling is its sibling, and it lives one floor up: in the MacBook notch. There are a lot of notch apps, and almost all of them turn the notch into a dashboard — media controls, calendars, clipboard managers. Notchling is the opposite: it's a someone, not a something. One creature. Its body language IS the interface: ▪ It watches your cursor, blinks, gets startled if you fling the mouse at it, and dozes off when you step away. ▪ Drag a file at it and it opens its mouth. Let go — gulp — and it carries the file for you. Links and text snippets too. Hover to see what it's holding, drag a chip back out, share one over AirDrop, click to open. It remembers across restarts. ▪ It swallows time: right-click → hold 5, 15 or 25 minutes. A little countdown chip, then a bounce and a chirp. A tea timer with a face. ▪ Drag the whole creature sideways to reach whatever fell behind it. It parks, keeps glancing back at its spot, and drifts home a few seconds later. ▪ It feels your battery. Plugged in, it gets a warm, content flush on its cheeks. Running low, it starts yawning. The moment you cross critical, it shoots one worried glance at your battery icon — once, and never nags. ▪ Right-click and there's a weather toy in there too — your local sky as a tiny living scene: a breathing sun, a cratered moon with shooting stars, rain that splashes on the lip, snow that piles up, fog banks, forked lightning. ▪ And when you want nothing at all: Hide shrinks it to the bare hardware notch — invisible until you click the notch (or drag a file at it) to bring it back. ▪ It knows when you're on a call: camera in use → it politely shuts its eyes. Mic in use → a small waveform thought. It reads device state only, never captures anything, and never triggers a permission prompt. ▪ If you use Claude Code: a small ember pulse glows under the notch while your agents are working (hover shows which projects) — and when a session gets blocked waiting on you, an ember mark appears, it glances down, and one click jumps you to that terminal. It reads the same local markers as Crew. ▪ Small things it simply notices: Caps Lock on → eyes wide. Wi-Fi drops → one puzzled look around. Disk over 90% → it looks visibly stuffed. Fifty minutes without a break → a pointed stretch. And you can shush it for an hour. ▪ Music on? Hover for previous/play/next and the track name; scroll over the notch to scrub. Spotify and Apple Music, via their public interfaces — no private frameworks that break every macOS update. ▪ Fresh screenshots too: drag the little floating thumbnail straight at it. ▪ Three opt-ins, all off by default: watch Downloads (it chews while one runs, then holds the finished file), meeting whispers (five minutes before your next event, read-only calendar), and music. ▪ Everything it holds shows as chips — click one to open, × to remove, and "+N" unfolds the whole shelf. ▪ It CHEWS what you feed it: right-click a held image → convert to JPEG/PNG, shrink it, or read the text out of it (straight to your clipboard). All on-device — Apple's own engines, given a face. The stuff other notch apps charge $10–29 for, free. Honest notes: ▪ macOS 13+, Apple Silicon and Intel, under 1 MB. No account, no telemetry, and no background network calls. Exactly two things ever touch the network, and only if you ask: the weather toy (ipapi.co to turn your IP into a rough city, then open-meteo for the sky — no location permission involved) and the update check, which runs when you click it and never otherwise. ▪ Idle cost is engineered hard: under half a percent CPU while it lives. I profiled it until the fans had nothing to say. ▪ It isn't notarised yet, so a browser download gets flagged. The terminal one-liner on the site installs without any warning (curl doesn't quarantine), and the SHA-256 is published next to it. ▪ Completely free. Crew is the one that pays the rent. Built in Swift, solo, with Claude Code. Happy to answer anything — the mouth, the battery moods, or how you make a notch app cost nothing. What else should a creature in your notch be able to feel?