Avoiding the notch

So, does anyone know the ‘secret sauce’ that App developers are supposed to use to excuse the notch?
The thing that makes menus automagically flow around the notch and also prevent the mouse from going underneath it?
I cannot find it, just notes where Apple are telling people to pester developers to apply it.

No idea, but this must be an entry in Info.plist file, probably.

The only one I have heard mentioned is NSPrefersDisplaySafeAreaCompatibilityMode
but that seems to be the setting that makes the whole screen get 10% smaller, increasing the size of all the borders so you end up with a lot of wasted area.
Not ‘whatever it is that makes the notch inaccessible’

I found this:

On Macs that include a camera housing in the bezel, the auxiliaryTopLeftArea and auxiliaryTopRightArea properties of NSScreen contain the regions to the left and right of the camera housing. Use those properties and the visibleFrame property to determine where to display your content.

But I dont have anything I can apply to the mouse or my menus to account for this

I’m prototyping this.
if I don’t have room for all my top level menus, I could perhaps clone them, put them above the toolbar in document windows, and hide them from the ‘real’ menus, as a preference item.

Why is edit not next to File menu?
Maybe it’s enough to move Import/Export as an entry to File menu?

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Messing about.

Maybe it’s enough to move Import/Export as an entry to File menu?

It isn’t.
Even losing 3 menu headers is not enough to avoid this tumour.

There’s already a LOT of items in ‘File’.
(File items that relate to my own documents.
The import /export holds many items for file exchange with other apps and imagery.)

For reference:


If you are a ‘consumer’, the app is likely to be fine.
If you are a ‘creator’, you’re in trouble.

Jeff, from where are you getting those images?
Are you running Monterrey 12.0.1?

Those were snapped from a Big Sur machine at the moment. Just getting a feel for how wide the menus stretch

So it’s a fake notch

Edit: considering it shows in screenshots, of course it is.

A real notch would have the OS not put menus behind it, maybe abbreviate the names.
And please don’t put in a special compatibility plist entry. Your app will look old, since it can’t handle the new stuff.

Only status bar items, then?

If it appears I am confused and annoyed, that’s because I am :thinking:
Trying to find out what the true effect is without a real machine is difficult.

Looks like macOS has a bug with too many statusitems showing, even behind the notch.
But I assume this will get fixed quickly.

I was able to test a MacBook Pro 14 with the notch and Monterrey 12.0.1 running Numbers the notch is between Share and Window, nothing behind the notch.

This is an Apple application and I’m sure they know how to handle the notch. I can test more on Monday, creating a Xojo app with many menu items to see how Monterey handles that.

What I read (in Spanish) is that the video showing menu items behind the notch is a previous release of Monterey that several MacBooks shipped with. If you update to Monterey 12.0.1 the OS handles the menu correctly, drawing the next menu item to the right of the notch. Here is the article:

There is also a tweet in that article that shows that the system limits the number of icons to the right of the notch to never put something behind the notch, giving preference for system items so maybe some icons will not show if you have many.

edit: the article shows this photo of Affinity app:


The next item after ‘Vista’ (View) is ‘Ventana’ (Window) and the OS positions them one on the left and one on the right of the notch.

Thank you!

Is there some “Notch emulator”? So we could “preview” how a menu would behave in a “notched” machine?

There are several, but the real answer is no. They just draw a notch on the screen where it would appear physically, but they can’t convince the system that a notch actually exists so you don’t get the real world behavior.

Those “several” probably are just like a “fake a notch” joke. I’ve saw a few too. But an “emulator” must be something that does the job as if it was the real thing, fonts, sizes, gaps… Probably it’s a question of days for someone presenting one for us.

I doubt it. You’d have to convince the operating system that it’s installed on one of these computers.

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