Hover the notch while music is playing.

It now hangs a card down instead of stretching the pill sideways: artwork and title, a scrubber you can drag, and transport with 15-second skips. A notch is a hole at the top of the display, so the room it has is underneath it.

Four things were quietly broken

• Dragging a file from Cursor, Mail, Photos, Slack or a web page crashed the app. Those drags hand over an IOU rather than a file, and the code that caught the handover claimed a thread it was never called on. Plain Finder drags took a different path, which is why the Tray looked healthy.
• Clicking the notch did nothing while media played. The click was received and then dropped between two layers that disagreed about which one opens the drawer.
• The now-playing pill often never appeared. Without Full Disk Access the app could not read whether a Focus was on, so it guessed — and guessed “on” at every launch. A Focus suppresses media pills, so the notch stayed empty and nothing said why. It also postponed every Notch Buddy reminder indefinitely.
• Dragging the progress bar jumped to the start of the track. The seek was sent in the wrong unit, so 1:30 asked for 90 microseconds.

New

• Four player layouts for the Desk widget — Stacked, Compact, Artwork and Minimal. Settings → Now Playing.
• The progress bar style in that pane now does something: Artwork and Gradient draw from the album's own colour.
• Select several files in the Tray — hit Select, or ⌘-click one — then copy, preview, remove, or drag the whole selection out in one go.
• Transport controls on the expanded pill, and in the notch card.

Fixes & improvements

• Activities appear on every display, not whichever screen the pointer happened to be on.
• Pausing leaves the pill up for the inactivity timeout with a stopped waveform, instead of animating over stopped music.
• Closing the drawer brings the resting pill back rather than leaving the notch bare.
• Notch Buddy reminders no longer wait for the music to stop, and no longer fire the instant your Mac wakes from sleep.
• ⌥-dragging the whole shelf out of the Tray now clears the rows it moved, rather than leaving them pointing at files that are gone.
• The Tray's “drop more” target is the size of an item instead of a banner, and the to-do card lines up on one edge.

iPhone Live Activities are withdrawn.

Reading a Live Activity meant holding a screen-capture stream on the menu bar, and macOS shows its screen-recording indicator for as long as one is open — so your Mac reported “OreoNotch — Currently Sharing”, with a Stop Sharing button, over a delivery tracker.

That is not a fair trade for a feature that was off by default, so it is gone for now. Nothing else in 0.4.0 changes — the Pomodoro clock, the reminders and the Notch Buddy are all still there.

• The iPhone Activities pane no longer appears in Settings
• No capture stream is opened, so the recording indicator never shows
• Accessibility and Screen Recording are no longer used for anything in the app; you can revoke both if you granted them only for this

A focus clock in the Desk, and something living under the notch.

Two ways to keep time, and one small companion to carry the news. Everything here is off or opt-in until you go looking for it — the notch behaves exactly as it did until you turn something on.

Pomodoro

• A focus clock in the Desk, next to the Timer — a ring, the minutes left, and a pip for each block in the set. It's in the Desk on a fresh install; if you've arranged your widgets already, switch it on in Settings → Widgets
• Start, pause, skip and stop from the widget, or from the notch's right-click menu when the drawer is shut
• Block and break lengths are yours, in Settings → Reminders, including how many blocks earn the long break
• It survives a sleeping Mac. The clock stores when the phase ends rather than counting down, so shutting the lid mid-block wakes up on the right side of the break instead of however far a timer happened to get

Reminders

• Water, movement, and the 20-20-20 rule for your eyes, plus one you write yourself. Each has its own wording and interval, and a preview button so you can see the thing before committing to it
• Nothing piles up while you're away. Locked, idle or in a Focus, the clock resets rather than saving a backlog — so lunch doesn't cost you six reminders in a row when you sit back down, and none of them fire the instant you do
• A Focus means a Focus. Reminders stay quiet while one is on, and the buddy sleeps through it
• No notifications, no permission to grant. The reminder is drawn on your own screen by the app that's already there

The Notch Buddy

• A small character hanging off the notch — a spider on a thread, a cat holding the edge, an astronaut on a tether, or any emoji you like. Off by default, in Settings → Notch Buddy
• It knows what the Mac is doing. Bobs while music plays, holds a mug while keep-awake is on, sleeps through a Focus, droops on a low battery
• It never takes a click. The buddy's window is transparent to the mouse, so whatever is underneath stays yours
• Reminders work without it. With the buddy off, it comes down only to deliver a reminder and leaves again

Also in this version

• A long to-do is readable again. Click a task to open it in place: the text wraps to its full length and can be edited there. Return or clicking away saves it
• Escape leaves the field instead of the drawer. Pressing it while typing in the Desk used to close the whole thing and take what you'd written with it. It now ends the edit; a second press closes the drawer