Already in 2021, Apple has given its laptops a level. Five generations later it is still here. But what’s really surprising is that Apple hasn’t messed around with any useful utilities, unlike Dynamic Island, which adds a functional twist to the pill-shaped hole on your iPhone’s screen.
Luckily, the developer community has created a handful of cool apps that turn the notch into an activity hub. The notch can now do a lot, from music playback to calendar control to a tiny viewfinder for the webcam.
During my recent foray into the Mac community forums, I discovered another beautiful app built around the boat-shaped notch, and it solved a crucial problem for me. And if you’re someone whose work revolves around a variety of websites and browser-based platforms, this will come as a pleasant surprise.
A game of links and notches
The app I’m talking about is called LinkNotch. The name speaks for itself – the app turns the notch into a hub for web links. Think of it like a container that contains a handful of links, but hides in plain sight and only appears when you move the cursor near (more specifically, behind) the notch area.
The idea behind this app is that you can park all your frequently visited websites behind the notch area. Instead of opening these tabs individually every working day after starting the browser. You can simply click through a scrollable list of links at the top of the screen.
With LinkNotch you can avoid tab clutter while still being able to reach all your favorite websites with one click. All you have to do is drag the cursor back and the notch will expand downwards with a smooth animation and a scrollable list of all the links you have saved.
A helpful note: You can organize all your links into different categories so that they appear neatly grouped. Now you might be thinking that there is a chance that the extended notch could be accidentally triggered and that is what happens. Quite common and can be frustrating if you have a vertical multi-screen setup.
Luckily, the app has a solution for this. Instead of triggering the notch bucket with the mouse cursor, you can set it to only activate when you make a click gesture behind the notch area. This approach solves two problems at once and looks pretty elegant doing it.
Save yourself the hassle of searching for the browser
As I mentioned earlier, manually entering a web URL every time you want to visit a website can be tedious. What about bookmarks? Well, I have way too many websites that I visit frequently and the bookmarks bar at the top just can’t accommodate them all.
But more importantly, I don’t want the bookmarks bar at all. When you’re working on a 13-inch laptop like the MacBook Air, every millimeter of vertical pixel space is valuable. And let’s not forget: the bookmarks bar with its many symbols and texts is an eyesore. The other option?
Instead of searching through my bookmarks, I could use an automation to launch a few selected websites at once, or use a third-party tool like RayCast to do this. However, these are neither easy to set up nor free for a non-technical MacBook user. And even if you can digest everything, opening multiple tabs at once will look messy and slow down work.
In my case, an average day for me starts with browsing a few select websites for the latest global news. And as I settle into the work zone, I move on to my email and scheduling tasks, followed by social media checks to find important product updates and the newsroom.
Next, the core apps that do my work appear on the screen. The list contains documents. Adobe Express and WordPress, followed by passionate project platforms spanning Google AI Studio, Opal and GitHub. You see where this is going, right? And let’s not forget the websites that take care of the fun and leisure aspect.
Now I can create a tab group for all of these websites. However, if I open a group of tabs when there are already a whole bunch of other websites running in the browser windows, the system visibly slows down – on top of the tab clutter it immediately throws at me.
LinkNotch handles the resource problem and the clutter problem at the same time. All you have to do is hover over it and click to open a tab. And once the task at hand is completed, you can close it, hover the cursor over the notch and open the other site you want. It’s like a net one tab situation, where your work flows from one tab to the next without ever opening a second one.
A parting gift
The principle of the app is pretty simple and you could even say that it is barebones. And the criticism would be justified. But for users like me—journalists, researchers, students, digital marketers, visual designers, and social media managers—whose work is scattered across half a dozen (or more) websites, LinkNotch brings much-needed oomph to the workflow.
And that’s why the subscription is worth it. The price varies depending on the country you live in, between $12 and $15 per year, but it’s definitely worth it. As the saying goes: sometimes it’s the simplest tools that solve a deep problem that thousands of people face every day. LinkNotch is one such solution for a MacBook paper cut.
And if you like the concept of a Notch-based productivity app and your total budget can be up to $20, I highly recommend NotchBox. This adds a whole dimension of additional controls to the notch area. It can play music, double as a clipboard, manage Pomodoro timers, set a stopwatch, provide insight into network statistics, and even launch apps. It even has a browser function built into the notch container.
This also serves as a hot center for storing and retrieving frequently used files. All you need to do is a simple drag and drop with the file package. And it’s pretty light on system resources, in case you’re wondering, so there’s that. Overall, these two apps can make your daily Mac workflow a lot easier, and I highly recommend them. I just wish Apple would pay attention to the notch’s untapped potential and work its own magic.
Download NotchBox and LinkNotch from the App Store.
