OurNotch

OurNotch turns your MacBook notch into a little shared space for you and your person.
A heart from your partner arrives in your notch.
Open the Together tab to see your life together in numbers: days, weekends, hours, every second, and the countdown to your anniversary.
Tap a heart and it pours out of your partner’s notch on their Mac
Set your mood and it shows in your partner’s closed notch
Type a short note and it scrolls across your partner’s notch.
Hover to open the notch: a shared photo, a seconds-together counter and your partner’s mood
send emojis that flood your partner’s whole screen

Inspiration

My partner and I spend our days on our MacBooks in different places. A quick "thinking of you" text gets buried under work chats, and the notch sits at the top of the screen doing nothing. So I turned the notch into a tiny shared space for two of us.

What it does

OurNotch lives in the MacBook notch. Hover and it opens:

Hearts and emojis pour out of your partner's notch
Notes scroll across their notch like a banner
Mood shows next to your photo in their notch
Photos wait on their Home tab

Pair two Macs once and you're done. There's no server of ours involved: everything goes through iCloud and is end-to-end encrypted.

How I built it

I had never written Swift before. I built OurNotch with Claude Code using a plan-first loop: scope, then PRD, then spec, then small slices, each one its own pull request.

Notch window: a borderless panel above the menu bar, with a SwiftUI shape inside that grows and shrinks
Sync: CloudKit, with push pings and a 60-second safety-net check
Encryption: each Mac has its own key pair, and pairing derives a shared key both Macs use
Product: Dodo Payments licences, a Next.js website, notarization and auto-updates

Challenges

Learning Swift, AppKit, CloudKit and signing, all at once
Jittery notch animations, and the notch disappearing when I switched apps
Messages lagging between two real Macs. I fixed it by measuring delivery times and checking more often while the app is active.

What I learned

Planning first makes AI-built code much better, and real two-Mac testing catches what assumptions miss.