For TickerNotch 1.7 · Updated 31 July 2026
TickerNotch puts a live strip of market tickers, weather, social counters and scrolling news beside your MacBook’s notch. This guide covers every setting in the app. If a question is not answered here, write to [email protected] and a human answers, usually within a day.
TickerNotch is a menu-bar-level app with no Dock icon and no window of its own. After launch, the strips appear on both sides of the notch. Everything starts from three interactions:
On the first launch a welcome window explains this. If your Mac has no notch, TickerNotch draws a simulated island at the top of the screen instead, so the app works on external monitors and older Macs too (section 13).
Open Settings → Strip. The large search field at the top adds any kind of slot. Type what you want and pick from the grouped results:
| You type | You get |
|---|---|
BTC, apple, nasdaq | Market tickers. Company and index names work as well as symbols. |
Athens, New York | Weather for that city, with a metric picker. |
@mkbhd | A social counter. The same handle is offered for YouTube, Bluesky and Twitch; pick the platform you mean. |
owner/repo | GitHub stars for that repository. |
[email protected] | Mastodon followers. |
Results are labelled honestly. Live rows stream in real time, 24/7, from a crypto-derivatives venue. Delayed rows (stocks, indices, ETFs, futures, currencies) run roughly 15 minutes behind. When the same market exists in both, the live row wins and the delayed twin is hidden.
Pick a city, then choose one metric per slot: Temperature now, Today’s high / low, Feels like, Chance of rain, Rain amount (today’s accumulated total), UV index (today’s maximum), or Wind speed. Want two metrics for the same city? Add the city twice. You can rename the short strip label before adding. Weather data comes from Open-Meteo; your own location is never read.
GitHub, Bluesky, Mastodon, YouTube and Twitch are supported. When you pick a suggestion, the app fetches the live count right away, so a mistyped handle never lands on your strip. You can set the short label shown next to the number (it defaults to the platform, e.g. GH or YT).
Two built-in rows show this Mac itself: SYS (CPU load, then memory used) and NET (network down, then up). They are permanent list entries; hide them with the notch mark if you don’t want them on the strip.
The Your strip list in Settings → Strip is the single source of truth. Its order is the strip order. Each row has these controls:
Every ticker row has a Holdings line. Click it to enter your position: one or more lots as quantity @ price, plus a Long / Short switch. Once a position is set, the strip shows your dollar gain or loss for that ticker instead of the daily percentage. Leave the lots empty to go back to the daily %. Holdings never leave your Mac.
At the bottom of the Strip tab: temperature in °C or °F, wind in km/h or mph, rain amount in mm or inches.
Open Settings → News. Headlines come from RSS and Atom feeds fetched directly on your Mac. There is no server in between.
Add a channel by pasting either a feed address or just the site’s domain, like macsources.com. The app finds the feed a site declares on its own, so you don’t need to know what RSS is. For publishers without a public feed (Reuters, AP, Bloomberg), a Google News search feed works: https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=source:Bloomberg. Up to 30 channels can be added.
Each channel row has an eye to mute it temporarily and a minus to remove it. A Reset to default sources button restores the starter set.
A headline counts as breaking in either of two ways: its title contains one of your keywords (matched case-insensitively, whole words only, so “alerts” does not match “ALERT”), or it comes from a channel where you ticked Treat everything from this channel as breaking. That checkbox sits under each channel and is meant for dedicated alert feeds.
Breaking rules only matter when a side is set to Breaking news in Layout. One common setup: all news on the left, breaking only on the right.
When both sides show news, the second side either mirrors the first side’s channels (the default, and the right choice for “everything on one side, breaking on the other”) or carries its own separate channel list. Untick Same channels as the first side to split them.
Settings → Layout owns every decision about what goes where.
In Symmetric mode one slider sizes the island from 20% to 100% of the screen width, centred on the notch. In Asymmetric mode each side gets its own slider (5% to 100% of that side’s span), so you can, say, keep news wide on the left and the ticker strip short on the right. The strips always hug the notch; a smaller island just leaves more empty screen at the edges.
Each flank is set independently to News, Breaking news or Strip. Two strip sides split your slot list between them rather than duplicating it. Two news sides enable the second lane (section 4).
When another app goes full-screen, choose whether the strips stay, always hide, or hide only while a known media app (QuickTime, IINA, VLC, TV, Music, browsers and similar) plays full-screen video.
Paged shows a fixed number of slots at a time (1 to 6 per page) and rotates through your whole list at a pace you set (2 to 60 seconds per page). Fewer slots per page means larger text. Marquee scrolls everything continuously instead, like the news.
If the strip doesn’t sit pixel-perfectly on your notch (this varies with scaled display modes), click the calibration pad and nudge with the arrow keys. Each press moves exactly one physical pixel; hold ⇧ for ten. Up and down move the strip bottom onto the notch edge, left and right centre it, and a plus/minus row shifts the whole island vertically. While the pad is focused, a one-pixel magenta guide line draws on the live notch so you can see exactly where the edge lands. Calibration is stored per display. Reset to auto returns to the automatic value.
Settings → Text has two controls. The Typeface picker offers ten faces, described by character rather than name: Rounded, Clean system, US highway sign, Airport / departure board, Maximum legibility (the default), Trading terminal (mono), Engineered technical, Humanist / warm, Universal, and Easy-reading. Every face covers Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and more; anything a face lacks falls back to the system font.
The News size slider runs 8 to 26 pt. The ticker strip has no size slider on purpose: it sizes itself to fit however many slots you show, and never clips.
Click either strip, press ⌃⌥T, or (in the direct-download edition) tap four fingers on the trackpad. The island unfolds into a panel with two halves:
The panel stays open until you toggle it again, and it remembers where you scrolled.
Open a chart by clicking a ticker cell in the expanded panel, or from a menu-bar pin’s popover. Several chart windows can be open at once.
The Indicators menu toggles overlays on the price chart (SMA, EMA, Bollinger Bands, Supertrend, and a volume profile drawn along the price axis) and separate panes below it (RSI, MACD). Volume bars render under the candles.
Import indicator… loads an indicator written in JavaScript from a file on your disk. The script runs sandboxed inside the app with an execution time limit, and nothing is ever downloaded: you choose a local file in a standard open panel. This is for users who want to bring their own formulas; the built-ins cover the common cases.
Settings → Alerts sends a macOS notification when a price does something you care about. Two kinds of rule:
Alerts are created from your watchlist tickers, so they always have a live price behind them. Each alert in the list can be paused and resumed with one click, or removed. TickerNotch must be running for alerts to fire, and macOS will ask once for notification permission.
Any slot can be pinned to the macOS menu bar as its own live item: a ticker price, a city’s temperature, a follower count. Pin and unpin from the pin button on each row in Settings → Strip. Pin text follows the menu bar’s appearance, exactly like Apple’s own status items.
Click a pin for a detail popover: the full reading, the day’s high and low for tickers, when it last updated, and buttons to open the full-screen chart, open Settings, or unpin. One thing to know: macOS hides menu-bar items when the bar runs out of room, especially beside the notch. If a pin doesn’t appear, remove something else from the menu bar or pin fewer slots.
Everything on this tab is part of Pro.
Replaces the black strips with an animated GPU background. Twelve styles (Aurora ribbons, Liquid plasma, Deep nebula, Rising embers, Particle mist, Electric arc, Lightning storm, Data rain, Falling code, Market pulse, Bokeh drift, Hyperspace warp) in several colours, with a live preview. Off by default; the pure black look is the standard product.
Draws a simulated dynamic island at the top centre of displays that have no physical notch: external monitors and older Macs. The strips (and shader, if on) render there. It sits over the menu-bar centre; your menus and status icons stay native. On by default, because without it those screens would show nothing. The island height is adjustable (26 to 44 pt), and a preview toggle lets you see the simulated look on your notched display while setting it up.
All in Settings → About:
| Edition | How it unlocks |
|---|---|
| Direct download (bitvibelabs.com) | 7-day full trial, then free forever with one ticker, one weather slot, one social counter, one news channel, one alert and one pin. Pro (lifetime or monthly) unlocks everything. A license is active on one Mac at a time and moves freely: activate on a new Mac and the old one deactivates, or use Deactivate this device in Settings → License first. |
| Setapp | Every feature is included with the Setapp subscription. Nothing to activate, no license tab, no purchases inside the app. |
On the free tier your extra slots, channels and settings are all kept: the app simply shows one of each kind, and the notch mark picks which one. Upgrade and everything you saved switches back on.
TickerNotch shows market data for information only. It is not financial, investment or trading advice, and prices may be delayed or differ from official sources. Don’t rely on it for trading decisions.
Email [email protected]. The same links live inside the app under Settings → About → Help & support and in the Help menu: this guide, the Terms of Use, the Privacy Notice, and the logs folder for bug reports.
← Back to TickerNotch