How to make your MacBook’s notch actually useful

The notch is dead space (for now)

The camera has to live somewhere, so Apple carved out the middle of the menu bar for it. The result is a strip about the width of a credit card that shows nothing, and quietly swallows menu bar icons when you have too many.

It’s also the one place on screen you never cover with a window. That makes it a great spot for things you want to glance at without hunting for them.

Let it show what’s happening

With SideDock, the notch grows a little to the sides and shows a live activity, the way an iPhone’s Dynamic Island does:

• Your next event, counting down
• What’s playing, with the cover and a moving waveform
• Coding agents at work: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Antigravity and Hermes
• Downloads, charging, volume and brightness, your earbuds’ battery
• Caps Lock, Focus, timers, the stopwatch and AirDrop

When nothing is going on, it shrinks back to plain black. No blinking, no badges.

Open it for everything else

Click the notch, or just hover if you’d rather, and it opens into Home: your music, what’s next, the weather and Pip, side by side. One tab over is a tray: drag a file up to the notch to park it for later, or AirDrop it from there.

Then move the pointer away and it folds back into the camera. You never open an app, and you never lose your place.

Make it look like it belongs

Pick Black to match the hardware, Frosted for a soft glass, or Dynamic Glass, which bends whatever is behind it like a lens. (Dynamic Glass needs Screen Recording permission; without it you get Frosted.)

No notch? You still get one

On a Mac without a notch, SideDock puts a notch-style bar at the top of the screen that does all of the above. It needs Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later.