Buoy

Why it exists

With a few Claude sessions running and music on, I kept switching apps just to see whether anything needed me. Meanwhile the notch on my MacBook sat there doing nothing, so I gave it the job.

What it does

• The notch stays dark until something's live. Then it grows small wings and a glow: your album's color while music plays, amber when a session needs you, red when something failed.
• Hover and a panel drops down with the music controls and everything running as tiles, with what needs you first. Click a session's tile and you're in that session.
• Timers sit beside your sessions, and a slim row of quick links waits underneath: a screenshot, a focus timer, keep awake or a new Claude session.

Under the hood

Buoy is native: SwiftUI views in an AppKit panel that sits over the notch, written in Swift 6. Claude Code tells it what each session is doing through hooks, so nothing waits on a server. Now playing comes through one bundled script, so when the next macOS changes something, there's one piece to fix.