Questions, answered.

TopShelf is a Mac app that turns the dark strip around your MacBook's camera into a calm, glanceable home for music, files, meetings, timers and more, and reminds you to take healthy breaks. Move your pointer to the top of the screen to open it; move away and it tucks itself back.

No. On MacBooks with a camera housing at the top of the screen, TopShelf lines up with it exactly. On an iMac, Mac mini or an external display, it draws its own bar at the top centre of the menu bar.

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon or Intel. The 1.1 preview download is a 3.8 MB universal disk image. The Glass theme uses Liquid Glass on macOS 26 and later.

Apple Music and Spotify.

No. Smart Pause holds breaks during calls, video, full-screen apps and focus apps you choose, and waits while you type or drag. Only active screen time counts, and stepping away counts as a break.

That's up to you. Casual always lets you skip or postpone. Balanced unlocks Skip after 5 seconds, and postponing is always possible. Hardcore has no skip or postpone, only an emergency press-and-hold exit.

TopShelf never steals focus from the app you're in, and it hides itself in full-screen apps. Hover opens it after a short delay you can adjust.

That's the Celebration alert, new in 1.1: a short stinger with a headline like TIME'S UP! or MEETING!, then the details. Prefer something calmer? Choose Colour flash or None in Settings › Appearance › Alert animation. With Reduce Motion it's a short fade.

No. Inbox is off until you turn it on. When it's on, it reads only Mail's unread count for each account and announces new mail when a count goes up. It never reads messages, senders or subjects.

No. It only reads unread counts, about once a minute while Mail is running, and never opens Mail. Asking Mail for the messages themselves makes it load the whole mailbox and freeze on big inboxes, so TopShelf doesn't.

Your WhatsApp unread count.

From 1.1, for two minutes, then they're deleted automatically. You can also choose never to record them. Passwords and anything that looks like a key, token or card number are never recorded.

No. Live Scores is off until you turn it on, and then it only fetches scores for the competitions you follow.

From 1.1, TopShelf starts at login by default. Turn it off in Settings › General (or System Settings › Login Items) and it stays off.

$9.99 (US dollars), once. There's no subscription: one lifetime licence covers 2 Macs and includes every 1.x update, free.

Yes. Try every feature free for 14 days, with no card and no sign-up. Keep it afterwards for $9.99, once.

One licence covers 2 Macs.

Yes: every 1.x update is free with your licence.

Control-Option-N (⌃⌥N) opens and closes it. ⌃⌥V opens clipboard history, ⌃⌥T starts a quick note and ⌃⌥D opens the dashboard. You can change any of them in Settings.

A 1.1 preview is the download on this site today, with Celebration alerts, opening on the Shelf, staying open while you use it, install and start at login, clipboard upgrades and Breaks. A few things built since then (Sense, Recent Apps in Calendar, the wellness line icons and iCloud sync) are not in it yet and will arrive in the next disk image. There is no date for that yet.

No. Sense is off by default and asks for camera access only after you enable the module, agree to its explanation and press Start. Frames are analysed in memory on your Mac and discarded: no video is recorded, nothing is uploaded, and there is no face recognition. Only numbers are kept (blink and head-orientation summaries per minute, check-ins, reminders), in a plain JSON file you can export or delete at any time. The camera light stays on for the whole session, and Sense is not in the current preview build.

No. TopShelf is wellness software, not a medical device. The pulse estimate is experimental: it reads tiny colour changes in the skin through the webcam, fails with movement, poor lighting and some cameras, has not been validated against reference instruments, and is not a heart-rate monitor. It is labelled experimental and shows nothing rather than a guess when the signal is poor.

Download the disk image, open it and drag TopShelf into Applications. Then open TopShelf and move your pointer to the top of the screen.