Dynamic Island
macOS ships nothing for the black bar at the top of your screen. The Dynamic Island turns it into a surface any ProToys module can publish to: hover it and a pane drops out of the cutout with the thing you need. Volume and output devices, a timer, your recent colours, a shelf of files you dragged there, and a launcher for every enabled tool. No Accessibility permission, and off until you turn it on.
Getting Started
How to enable
- Open ProToys from the menu bar and click Open ProToys…
- Select Dynamic Island from the sidebar.
- Toggle the switch to enable the module. It is off by default.
Opening it
Three ways, all equivalent:
- Hover the cutout and hold for a moment.
- Click it.
- Press ⌥⌘N from anywhere.
Click anywhere outside to dismiss it, or move the cursor away and it closes on its own. Clicking inside an open pane does nothing, so a click that misses a button will not throw away what you were reading.
ProToys draws the same 185×32 pill and places it just below the menu bar rather than over it, so it can never swallow a menu-bar click. Everything else behaves identically.
The Panes
The pane is a tabbed strip along the bottom. Which tabs appear, and in what order, is yours to set: any module that publishes to the notch shows up here, and a new one appears without you touching a setting.
| Pane | What it does |
|---|---|
| Audio Output | System volume, a switcher between speakers, headphones and AirPods, and a per-app mixer. One click instead of option-clicking the menu bar and hunting a list. |
| Awake | Keep the Mac awake for 30 minutes, 2 hours, or indefinitely, plus a separate option to keep running with the lid shut. |
| Timer | Drag along the minute ruler to set a duration, then Start. The bar drains as it counts down rather than filling, and the remaining time shows beside the cutout while it runs. |
| Colors | Your recent Color Picker samples with their hex values, and a button to pick another. A fresh pick keeps its place beside the cutout for 30 seconds. |
| Shelf | Files you dragged onto the notch. Convert them, get a share link, or drag them back out. See below. |
| Tools | A rail of every module you have enabled, launchable without leaving what you are doing. |
These six are what ship in the tab strip, but the surface is open to the whole app. Screen Ruler posts your last measurement, Text Extractor posts a fresh capture, Port Watcher announces a newly opened port, System Stats and Battery post readings, and a tool you pin gets its own tab. Anything ProToys can do, it can do from the notch.
The Shelf
Drag any file onto the notch and it stays there. The shelf is the one pane that works past a full-screen app and across Spaces, which makes it a reliable place to put something down while you go and find where it belongs.
Drop and pick back up
Drag files in to stash them, drag them out anywhere to drop them. Files are held by path, so nothing is copied and nothing is duplicated. Re-dropping a file that is already there moves it to the front instead of adding it twice.
Convert
Pick a stashed file and choose a target format. The file's real type is read from its contents rather than its extension, so a .jpg that is actually a PNG still converts correctly.
| From | To |
|---|---|
| Images | PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PDF |
| Documents | PDF, TXT, RTF, HTML, DOCX, ODT |
| PDFs | PNG, JPEG, TXT |
| Audio | M4A, WAV, AIFF |
| Video | MP4, MOV, or audio only |
| Anything | ZIP |
Share a link
Uploads the file and copies a link to your clipboard. Links expire after an hour. The upload is authorised with your licence key, which the server re-checks against Polar on every request, so the app carries no secret that could be extracted and reused.
Settings
Open ProToys Settings → Dynamic Island. Everything persists between sessions.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Pane order | Drag the tabs into the order you want. An explicit order always wins; anything you have not placed falls in by its own priority. |
| Hidden panes | Turn off any pane you do not want. A hidden pane is dropped before it is ever drawn, so its module never needs to know. |
| Hover delay | How long the cursor has to rest on the cutout before the pane opens. Raise it if it opens while you are reaching for the menu bar. |
| Open on hover | Turn hover off entirely and use the click or the shortcut instead. |
| Providers | Which modules are allowed to publish. Off by default for anything you have not enabled. |
Permissions
None of the panes above need Accessibility, Input Monitoring or Screen Recording. The only permission the island itself can ask for is Calendar access, and only if you turn on the next-event provider; decline it and you simply get no calendar tab.
Keyboard Shortcuts
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Open or close the island | ⌥⌘N |
| Move between panes | ← → while the tab strip has focus |
| Open on hover | Rest the cursor on the cutout |
| Toggle by gesture | Swipe vertically on the cutout |
| Dismiss | Click anywhere outside |
The sign of a vertical scroll flips with your natural-scrolling setting and differs between a trackpad and a wheel, so "down opens, up closes" would be backwards for half of everyone. A swipe therefore toggles. Horizontal swipes stay directional, because they are handed to the pane, which decides what left and right mean.