Skip to content
OpenNook
GitHub

Introduction

OpenNook is a Swift framework for building macOS apps that live in the menu-bar notch. It hands you a polished window that hover-expands out of the notch, a translucent backdrop, a settings shell, and a global hotkey - so you can drop a SwiftUI view into the expanded surface and have a working notch app. It is a base layer plus a working demo, not a finished product. The demo is intentionally minimal and exists as a known-good starting point to fork from.

Who it’s for

Swift developers who want to ship a notch-resident utility (a clock, a clipboard, a counter, a shelf, a live-activity surface) without rebuilding the window machinery from scratch.

What’s inside

OpenNook is two Swift modules, a thin demo app, and an optional components library.

NookSurface - the notch window

The low-level chrome: the notch-shaped panel itself, its shape geometry, hover behavior, expand/compact lifecycle, the translucent backdrop, and the shimmer feedback overlay. This is a trimmed, renamed fork of DynamicNotchKit and is licensed MIT.

You usually don’t edit NookSurface - you drive it through NookKit.

NookKit - the app chrome

Everything built on top of NookSurface to make it feel like an app: lifecycle (AppCoordinator), shared state (AppState), a dependency container (AppServices), persisted appearance preferences, the framework chrome shell (top bar + Settings) that hosts your registered home view, the compact slots flanking the physical notch, and a Carbon-based global hotkey controller.

NookApp - the library entry point

NookApp.main { MyHomeView() } is the one-line entry that wires the NSApplication, the coordinator, the menu-bar fallback, and your view together. Take a NookConfiguration overload when you need more control.

NookComponents - optional add-ons

Opt-in components built on the layers above. Depend on this product only when you want one - it is not pulled in by NookApp.

  • Shelf - drop files onto the notch, they collect in a persistent ShelfStore, drag them back out. See Examples/ShelfNook.
  • Activities - a priority live-activity queue that briefly takes over the expanded surface and yields when the user engages it. See Examples/ActivityNook.
  • Volume - an ambient volume glyph in the compact pill, driven by public CoreAudio APIs. See Examples/VolumeNook.