Your Mac buries the people who matter.
Transom doesn't.

transom

VIP texts, impossible to miss.

When one of your people texts, the card pins to your notch and stays there until you act on it. No 5-second banner you miss while you're heads-down. Reply right from the notch, without switching apps. (You pick who counts; everyone else stays quiet in Messages.)

VIP email, pinned when it lands.

The moment a VIP sender emails you, a card pins to your notch and holds there until you've seen it. One click opens the message. Mark it read or archive it from the card and it acts on the mailbox that message actually came from, not whichever one you happened to open last. The other two hundred emails wait for your next inbox sweep, exactly where they belong.

Login codes, handled.

The second a verification code arrives, it's waiting in your notch as a one-tap copy. You stop digging through Messages or your email to squint at six digits, and you stop depending on flaky autofill. Paste and you're in.

Your Focus modes drive it.

Turn on Work Focus and Transom switches itself to triage. Your VIPs and login codes still pierce. Email and everything else waits, counted, until you're back.

Turn Focus off and Transom comes back with you, plus a count of what it held.

You set it once per Focus, in the same System Settings panel where you set everything else. No shortcuts to build, no menu bar to remember. Sleep can go silent, Work can stay open to your people, and Transom just follows.

Four settings per Focus, named by what they let through: Everything gets through · VIPs, codes, and anything urgent · VIPs and codes only · Nothing gets through.

Emergencies break through, even from a number you never saved.

A text that says "call me" or "emergency" gets through, even from a number that isn't in your contacts. The babysitter on an unknown phone gets in. Marketing "urgent!" never does. (Apple's Emergency Bypass only works for contacts you've already saved. Transom doesn't need that.)

Reply without switching apps.

Answer without leaving what you're doing. You don't switch apps and you don't lose your place. Optional AI-suggested replies use your own key, and nothing ever auto-sends.

You'll know the moment it lands.

A card can announce itself with a sound and a flashing alert, so it reaches you even when you're heads-down in a full-screen app on a big monitor. Quiet enough to ignore for the things that can wait, loud enough for the things that can't.

Every mailbox. One lane.

Most people have a work inbox, a personal one, and a third that exists for receipts. The person who matters does not know which address they used, and would not care if you told them. Transom watches all of them at once and decides by sender, never by account.

No notch? Nothing changes.

Transom was born on a MacBook, but the triage was never about the hardware. It runs the same way on a Mac mini, a Mac Studio, an iMac, or a laptop working through an external monitor with the lid shut. The people who matter still can't get buried.

Transom collapsed along the top of an external display. There's no notch on this screen, and it doesn't need one.

Post anything to the top of your screen.

Everything above is Transom deciding what reaches you. This is you deciding. One line, from a Shortcut, a script, or any app on your Mac, puts a card in your notch with the same three powers your people get: it lands where you're already looking, it can stay pinned until you deal with it, and it can even carry a reply field that sends a real iMessage.

A build finishes. A deploy breaks. A render's done. Leave in 22 minutes or you'll miss pickup. If it matters, it goes in the notch instead of a banner you'll scroll past. Focus holds these quietly until you resurface, so a build alert never breaks your deep work. And when a machine message genuinely can't wait, a script can mark it urgent and it comes through the Focus anyway. Not a coder? A Shortcut does it with no code at all.

No SDK, no account, no library to install. Anything that speaks HTTP can post through a local, token-secured API; anything that can open a link can use transom://. It's the one thing Apple's notch will never do: let you decide what belongs there. See the API docs →

Battery, where you're already looking.

Your charge sits in the panel header, next to the date. Glance up at the notch the way you already do fifty times a day and it's there, instead of a tiny glyph wedged between a dozen menu bar icons or two clicks deep in Control Center.

Like every widget here, it switches off if you'd rather the notch did nothing but triage.

Date, charge, notification history, settings. One row, same place, every time.

And when fifteen percent forty minutes before a call is no longer a glance, one line from a Shortcut pins a card that waits for you instead of fading in six seconds:

Wire it to a battery-level automation once and forget it. See the API docs →

Yes, it asks for Full Disk Access. Here's exactly why.

It's the scariest-sounding permission macOS has, so you should know what it buys before you grant it. Full Disk Access is the only door Apple provides to your local Messages database, and reading that file is how Transom knows your wife texted three seconds ago and a delivery bot didn't. Without it, Transom can't tell your people from everyone else, which is the entire product.

What it does not buy: anything leaving your Mac. The reading happens on your machine and stops there. No Transom server exists to send it to. Sandboxed App Store apps can't do this at all, which is why Transom isn't in the App Store.

Download free trial That is the whole privacy policy, in plain sight.

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7 days free, then $29 once. Not a subscription. Transom 1.0.7 · 4.4 MB · macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later · Universal, Apple Silicon and Intel Setup guide and first-run steps →