Questions, answered plainly

• MacBook Pro or Air: the island lives in the notch, on the laptop’s own screen
• Mac mini, Studio or iMac: no notched display at all, so you get a floating island pinned to the top of the primary one
• Intel Macs are not supported and are not going to be

• No trial, no licence key, no paid tier
• If it earns its place there is GitHub Sponsors and Buy Me a Coffee, neither of which unlocks anything

• Seeing which media key you pressed requires Accessibility
• The bundled media helper is incompatible with the sandbox
• So it is a direct download, signed with a Developer ID, notarised by Apple, and it updates itself through Sparkle

• esc closes it, and so does a two-finger swipe up across it
• From anywhere, ⌃⌥⌘I toggles it, and that is rebindable

• A volume press interrupts a track. The track is still there underneath when the HUD goes — nothing is dropped, it queues
• Activities arrive; pages are what you browse to, and they are there whether or not anything has happened lately

• The date and the next three things on it, with what is playing beside them
• Click the date for today and tomorrow in full; swipe once more for the weather
• Which calendars count is up to you in Settings ▸ Glance
• The weather works from your location or from a city you type — you do not have to grant location to have weather

• Today, Music, Weather — wrapping, so either direction gets you anywhere in at most one turn
• The dots under the cutout say which page you are on and how many there are
• They fade about a second after you arrive, and come back on a turn, on opening, or as soon as the pointer is near them
• Clicking a dot works too, and goes whichever way round is shorter

• “What is playing” is a question with no answer on a quiet Mac, and a page that reliably said so would make the weather two flicks away for somebody who never plays anything
• So the swipe is Today → Weather until you start something, and then the player is back between them
• Your day keeps its music column and goes on saying Not playing there
• It is never taken out from under you: a track ending while you are looking at the player leaves the page exactly where it is

• Those are the two people live on, so whichever you were on last is where it comes back
• The weather is never remembered — it is a thing you go and look at and are then finished with, and a forecast fetched a quarter of an hour ago is the one page that can be stale on arrival
• If the player is where you live and the music has stopped, it comes back to your day — and back to the player next time something is playing

• Artwork, the times, and previous, play-pause and next that genuinely work — no click is delivered to any app over the lock, so the card asks the window server where the pointer is rather than waiting for an event that never arrives
• It drops in when the Mac locks and is gone the instant it is unlocked
• The notch up there answers the pointer too: move onto it and the padlock widens, with the same trackpad tap the island gives you unlocked
• Coming back can make a short sound, on its own switch under Settings ▸ General ▸ Lock Screen

• Images between formats and images to PDF; video and audio; Word, RTF, HTML, spreadsheets and presentations to PDF
• Audio and video can be transcribed — the text lands beside the original, nothing is uploaded and no permission is asked
• Copy Link puts a shareable iCloud link on your clipboard; for anything outside iCloud Drive that row becomes AirDrop
• An action is offered only when it applies to every file you selected

• A notch island has to be optically continuous with the bezel, and a floating one has nothing to be continuous with — so it was never a matter of taste
• The style picker, the compact size, the width, height, peek and speed sliders and the shadow all went with it
• What you can still change is what it says: every source is a switch in Settings ▸ Sources, and Settings ▸ General has the list of apps it stays out of

• Isleta has no Dock icon and no window
• The icon can be hidden in Settings ▸ General, and that is safe because nothing lives only there
• Right-click the island for the same menu — the way in with no icon and no shortcut to remember
• Quit and Open Setup Guide are also in Settings ▸ About

• Press anywhere along it to send the level there, or hold and drag to slide it
• The bar is only a few points tall but what you can aim at is much taller, so you do not have to be precise
• Press the middle of the notch instead and the reading goes away, opening the island on whatever you were last looking at

• The HUDs are three switches under one master, and the brightness one can be off while volume is on
• Isleta follows the display brightness only
• The keyboard backlight is not shown: macOS moves that level for ambient light on its own, and the island would be announcing something you had not done

• Isleta asks the first time you open the island on your day
• Full access rather than write-only, because write-only returns no calendars at all — which is the opposite of what a “what’s next” surface needs
• If it is granted and the day is still empty, check which calendars are included in Settings ▸ Glance — no choice means all of them, so a narrowed list is the thing to look at

• Without it the level still appears, and the bar still fills and empties; it just cannot tell a volume press from a brightness one, and the island will not lean at the ends of a range
• This is the one macOS prompt that shows again after a refusal, so changing your mind costs nothing

• It keeps leaning for as long as you hold the key down
• It needs Accessibility. The reading itself, and the bar filling and emptying, work without it
• A muted Mac’s bar cannot be dragged either: it is drawn at nothing whatever the volume behind it is, so pressing it opens the island instead. Unmute first

• Grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility
• Going the other way, Settings ▸ Sources has Replace the system volume HUD and Replace the system brightness HUD under the HUD source
• Two switches rather than one: volume is recoverable from Control Center if Isleta gets it wrong, and a screen you cannot dim is not
• Quitting Isleta hands the keys straight back

• The update check, which carries nothing about you and is a switch in Settings
• The weather, only once you have allowed location or typed a city. That request carries a place and nothing else
• Turn the first off and never ask for the second, and Isleta does not touch the network at all

The whole policy →

• Never a track title, a file name, an event title or a city
• It lives at ~/Library/Logs/Isleta, rotates at a couple of megabytes and keeps four files, so it cannot grow past about eight
• Export Logs… bundles it up — in Settings ▸ About, in the menu bar menu, and in the menu a right-click on the island puts up
• Safe to attach to an issue