Glasswings
Liquid Glass notification banners for macOS, drawn without the notification system.
Focus does not silence them
Banners appear during screen sharing, during lock-screen mirroring and over full-screen apps — the moments when a system notification stays quiet, because nothing here goes through Notification Center.
Nothing to grant, nothing to lose
The daemon owns its own windows, so there is no Notification Center toggle that can be switched off by accident and no permission needed to show a banner at all.
Banners update in place
Send the same id again and the banner changes rather than stacking, with auto-dismiss timers kept in sync across a group.
Glasswings is a small resident daemon that draws translucent banners in the top-right corner of your screen. It renders SwiftUI's real Tahoe glass material into borderless panels of its own, and never touches the notification framework at all. That single decision is the whole product.
Styling goes further than a system banner can: clear Tahoe glass with a tint, Murano stains, animated SF Symbols, alpha video behind the text, and action buttons that appear on hover.
It installs per-user without sudo, or system-wide with it. The installer compiles the daemon, assembles the app, signs it with your Developer ID, writes the launch agent and starts it. The agent runs at adaptive priority with low priority IO: idle CPU sits at roughly zero, resident memory at 50–80 MiB, most of it shared framework code.
Intercepting existing notifications needs Full Disk Access, and forwarding a button press through to a native banner needs Accessibility. The banners themselves need neither.
Requires macOS 26 Tahoe or newer, because the glass material it draws with does not exist before that.
Glasswings and Notification Center
- While your screen is mirrored
- Notification CenterSilenced by the Focus macOS turns on for you. That is the point of Focus: a private message must not appear in front of an audience.
- GlasswingsShows, because it never goes through Notification Center. Safe for the same reason it is possible — you wrote the text, so there is nothing private in it to leak.
- Permission
- Notification CenterAsked for once, and revocable in System Settings at any time.
- GlasswingsNone to ask for. The daemon draws its own windows, so there is no toggle to grant and none to switch off by accident. Intercepting existing notifications is a separate feature and does need Full Disk Access.
- The same thing twice
- Notification CenterTwo notifications, because that is what they are. They stack.
- GlasswingsSend the same id again and the banner changes in place, with the auto-dismiss timers of a group kept in sync.
- How it looks
- Notification CenterOne appearance for every app on the machine, which is what makes a notification recognisable as one.
- GlasswingsTahoe glass with a tint, animated SF Symbols, video behind the text, buttons that appear on hover.
Notification Center is where a notification belongs. It keeps a history you can scroll back through, every app on your Mac already speaks it, and it respects Focus — which is a promise, not a limitation. Glasswings keeps no history, ignores Focus by design, and shows only what you send it yourself. If you want the system's guarantees, use the system.
- macOS 26 or later
Latest change Unreleased
Glasswings is not cut into numbered releases: development is continuous, and the most recent work tuned the banner appearance toward the real Control Center panels.
A first numbered version will be published here when the build is packaged for sale.