Cyclop

English · [Русский](README.ru.md)

The MacBook notch as a working tool. A native SwiftUI/AppKit app: invisible at rest, and on hover it unfolds downwards into a panel with a player, a shelf for files, clipboard history and your next meetings.

[Download the latest version](https://github.com/akalikbergenov/cyclop/releases/latest) — macOS 15 or newer. Signed and notarised, so it opens on the first try.

The track in the screenshot is playing in a browser tab — Cyclop reads it from macOS itself, with no permissions and nothing to configure in the browser. How that works is below.

What it does

The panel opens when the pointer reaches the notch and collapses when it leaves. Tabs switch on hover as well — but only if the pointer has come to rest on the icon: one passing through switches nothing. During a file drag the panel opens by itself and goes straight to the shelf. The menu bar icon toggles the panel, hides every tab's contents at once, and quits. The icon itself can be removed — ⌘-drag it off the bar, or flip the switch in Settings — and relaunching Cyclop brings it back.

Any tab can be switched off in Settings → Show in Panel. Off means two things: the icon leaves the rail, and the tab's background work stops with it — the clipboard poll, the calendar watch, the Now Playing helper, the rate fetch. The rail is for what gets a glance between other things; a mode used once a month may live there, but only as long as the people who never use it can take it off.

Requirements

• macOS 15 or newer (the Translate tab runs on Translation.framework)
• Swift 6 toolchain (the full Xcode is not needed, Command Line Tools are enough)

The app works on Macs without a notch too: the panel then treats a 180 × 24 pt area at the top centre of the screen as one.

Cutting a release

Builds the image, tags v and creates a GitHub release with the .dmg attached. The notes are two parts: a few lines written by hand, kept in docs/releases/.md, followed by the commit list GitHub assembles. The script refuses to run without the hand-written part — a list of commits answers "what changed in the code", while whoever arrives is asking "what does this give me", and no generator turns the first answer into the second.

The number is written in one place, Scripts/version. From there it goes into the app's Info.plist, into the image name and into the tag, so they cannot drift apart. The script also refuses to run on a dirty tree, on unpushed commits, or when the tag already exists.