Crest

Crest 6 turns the MacBook notch into something you actually use.

Hover the notch and it opens into pages: Now, Home, Work and Code. Swipe with two fingers to move between them, and fill each one with widgets you can stretch from small to wide: music, weather, calendar, to-dos, notes, batteries, the Shelf for files and a searchable clipboard history.

If you work with Claude Code, Codex or Copilot CLI, their questions show up on the notch as one card. Pick an answer, type your own, or allow or deny a command, and the answer lands back in your terminal.

The Authenticator, in Crest Pro, keeps your two-factor (TOTP) codes in the notch: when a site asks in Safari, Chrome, Arc, Brave or Edge the code is offered and typed in for you, and one press copies it from any app. Codes are locked behind Touch ID and sync across your Macs end-to-end encrypted.

Music sits on the closed notch with the album art and a live equaliser. Scroll on the notch to change the volume, and hold a window at the notch to snap it into one of 12 layouts.

Free to download, with no account: Now Playing, the Shelf, the Clipboard, window snapping and answering your coding agents never expire. Crest Pro comes with Take, a screen recorder that hands your recording back already edited, and Minutes, a meeting notetaker that runs on your Mac. All three are $24.99 once, with updates through Crest 7, or $2.99 a month or $14.99 a year. Your first sign-in gives you 7 days of Pro free, no card.

Needs macOS 14 or later (Minutes needs macOS 26 on Apple Silicon). On a Mac without a notch, Crest sits as a small pill at the top of the screen.