A solo indie hacker launched Islet, a gorgeous utility that transforms the MacBook notch into a functional Dynamic Island using native Swift + AppKit.
Apple gave us the MacBook notch, and we’ve been trying to ignore it ever since. But instead of crying about it, a pragmatic solo dev decided to reclaim that dead space and turn it into a buttery-smooth Dynamic Island.
Enter Islet, a native macOS menu bar utility that just landed on Product Hunt and is turning heads across the Apple enthusiast community.
Here’s a quick summary for those who don’t have time to dig through the product launch details:
The launch immediately triggered interesting discussions among macOS developers and UI enthusiasts:
Many frontend developers praised the execution of the animation. Porting Apple's iOS spring physics to macOS without it looking choppy or lagging is notoriously hard. Islet seems to have nailed the damping and response constants.
One clever dev pointed out a huge pain point in macOS development: "How did you catch screen brightness changes in real-time? Apple doesn't expose a clean public API for that."
The creator, Lippi, openly shared his secret sauce: Instead of polling via IOKit (which kills performance), Islet sets up a HID-level event tap that intercepts the physical F1/F2 keys before they even reach the window server. It then manually writes the brightness change using the private DisplayServices.framework loaded via dlopen. If that undocumented trick ever fails, it gracefully falls back to letting macOS handle the key natively. Pure engineering pragmatism at its finest!
Of course, relying on undocumented APIs (like CGSSpace to overlay on fullscreen apps) means there's a risk. A single minor macOS point release could completely break the app's core functionality. The developer acknowledged this, stating that he keeps a close eye on Apple's developer betas and is prepared to ship rapid hotfixes when things inevitably break.
There’s a legendary quote from the developer's launch comment that every aspiring developer should write down:
"The concept was the easy part. Getting the spring-physics expand/collapse to feel native — not janky — took a lot of manual trial-and-error, way more hands-on debugging than 'just prompt an AI and ship it.'"
In a market currently flooded with lazy ChatGPT wrappers and bloated Electron web apps, seeing a highly optimized, native utility built with extreme care is refreshing. True UX polish and native performance are still worth paying for.
If you have a notched MacBook and want to give it some actual utility, grab the 3-day trial and see if it fits your workflow!
Source: Product Hunt - Islet
