Peek

Hover, peek, gone.
A small island for your Mac’s notch.

Install · What it does · Development · Contributing

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About

Peek puts the useful bits of your Mac at the notch: what is playing, the volume and brightness, your battery, a timer, and your headphones connecting. It shows each for a moment, and the rest of the time it is just the notch.

It is built around three things:

• Simple. A handful of things people actually reach for, each done well. There are no widgets, shelves or dashboards, and the settings fit in a small window.
• Light. While it is collapsed and nothing is happening it does no work: nothing polls and nothing wakes the CPU. A module you switch off is stopped, not hidden. The whole app is about 4 MB.
• Private. No permissions, no accounts and no telemetry. Peek never uses the network on its own; see Privacy.

Why Peek exists

There are good notch apps already, and some do much more than Peek. Boring Notch is a well-known open-source one, with a calendar, a file shelf and more. If you want a lot at your notch, use one of them.

Peek is for a narrower want:

• A notch that costs nothing when idle. Nothing running in the background and nothing redrawing. It is measured, and the script is in scripts/, so you can check it yourself.
• No permissions. Where a feature would normally need one, Peek finds another way or leaves the feature out.
• A small codebase that is easy to read, change or fork.

What it does

• Now Playing. Artwork and a level indicator beside the notch for whatever is playing, from any app that reports to the system. Hover the island to open the full panel: artwork, title, a scrubber you can drag, and previous, play/pause and next.
• Volume and brightness. The level appears at the notch for a moment, alongside the stock macOS overlay.
• Battery. A peek when power is connected or disconnected, and one warning as the battery crosses your low-battery level.
• Bluetooth headphones. A card with the device's name when earbuds or headphones connect or disconnect, and where the sound went.
• Timer and stopwatch. Peek's own, one at a time. Start one from the menu bar. A ring and a label sit beside the notch; with music playing the timer breaks off as a small pill, and hovering opens Now Playing and the timer side by side. It is not tied to the Clock app.
• Lock screen (optional, off by default). Draws the island above the lock screen too. Anyone at the screen can see what is playing and control playback, but cannot open apps from it.
• Full screen. In a full-screen app the island steps out of the way until you hover the notch.

Control the timer from a script

open "peek://timer/start?minutes=25&label=Focus"
open "peek://stopwatch/start"
open "peek://timer/pause"     # also: resume, lap, cancel

Requirements

• macOS 15.6 or later on Apple Silicon. Developed and tested on macOS 26.
• A Mac with a notch for the intended look. On a Mac without one it falls back to a small pill at the top center, which has not been tried yet.
• No permissions. Peek does not ask for Accessibility, Screen Recording, Camera, Calendar or Full Disk Access. It has no accounts and no telemetry, and never uses the network on its own; see Privacy.

Install

Peek is not signed with an Apple Developer ID (that costs $99 a year, and this is a free project), so macOS asks you to approve it once.

1. Download Peek-1.0.0.dmg from the Releases page and open it.
2. Drag Peek onto Applications.
3. Open Peek. macOS says it can't verify the app. Click Done.
4. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll down, and click Open Anyway next to Peek. Confirm.
5. Peek opens. You will not be asked again.

Until step 4 is done, macOS also stops Peek's Now Playing helper from loading. If Now Playing shows nothing after installing, that is why, and Settings says so. Approving the app fixes it, and so does this command in Terminal:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Peek.app

The tests behind this are written up in ThirdParty/mediaremote-adapter/VENDORED.md.

Use

Peek has no Dock icon. Look for its icon in the menu bar: it starts a timer or stopwatch, opens Settings and About, and quits. The island itself is the rest: play something, change the volume, plug in your charger, or hover the notch.

Uninstall

1. In Settings → General, turn off Open at login (if you turned it on).

2. Quit Peek from its menu bar icon.

3. Drag Peek from Applications to the Trash.

4. Optional, to remove its saved settings:

   defaults delete io.github.ammaaraslam.Peek

That is everything: Peek writes only its preferences file and the login item, and keeps no cache or helper files.

Privacy

• No accounts, no analytics and no telemetry.
• Peek never uses the network on its own. Nothing runs in the background that connects anywhere, and nothing is sent without you starting it.
• Version 1.0 makes no network connections at all. If an update check is added later, it will only run when you press its button or turn it on, and this section will say exactly what it contacts and what it sends.
• It asks for no permissions, and it stores only its own settings (and a running timer) on your Mac.

Development

Peek is built with Swift and SwiftUI and needs Xcode 26 or later. Open Peek.xcodeproj and press ⌘R; it builds without a developer account. How it is put together, how to run the tests, build a disk image and measure performance is in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.

Roadmap

• A pill for Macs without a notch, and a choice of display.
• Auto-update.
• An extension API, so scripts and apps can push their own live activities.

Not planned for the core: clipboard history, notes, a file shelf, a launcher, weather or stats dashboards, notification mirroring, accounts, sync or telemetry.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md first; it explains what Peek will and will not become. Security problems go through SECURITY.md.

License

The code is MIT; see LICENSE. The vendored mediaremote-adapter is BSD-3-Clause, and its license ships inside the app. The icon artwork is not under the MIT license; see Design/LICENSE.md.