Transom needs one permission to do its job, and macOS will ask you about it in its own words. Here is exactly what you'll see, in order, and what to click.
Open the downloaded Transom-1.0.7.dmg, drag the Transom icon onto the Applications folder beside it, then eject the disk image. Running it from your Downloads folder works, but Applications is where macOS expects it to live.
Double-click Transom. macOS checks the notarization ticket, tells you who signed it, and asks if you're sure. Click Open. Transom appears in your menu bar, not your Dock, and its panel becomes live at the top of your screen.
If macOS refuses outright, right-click Transom in Applications and choose Open, then confirm. Or open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the security section, and click Open Anyway. Both paths are macOS asking you to vouch for a first launch outside the App Store.
This is the one that matters. Full Disk Access is the only door macOS gives an app to read your local Messages database, which is how Transom knows your wife texted three seconds ago. Transom's setup window has a button that opens the exact panel, and shows a live checkmark the moment it lands.
Nothing leaves your Mac as a result. There is no Transom server and no account to sign into. That's the whole privacy policy.
Everything below is off until you want it, and Transom works without any of it.
Click the menu bar icon → Preferences → VIPs, and add the two or three names you never want to miss. Start small. A VIP list of fifteen people is just notifications again.
Worth the ninety seconds: after this, turning on Work Focus switches Transom to triage, and turning it off brings Transom back with a count of what it held.
Once per Focus. Setting up Work doesn't set up Sleep.
Skip this on a MacBook you never dock, since the notch is dead pixels and filling it costs you nothing. If you work on an external monitor, a Mac mini, a Mac Studio, or an iMac, this is the one setting worth a look.
The spot you hover to open Transom is the same size either way, so Quiet costs you nothing but the marker.
Transom is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized, with the ticket stapled into the disk image, so it verifies even offline. If you'd rather confirm the bytes yourself, run this in Terminal against the file you downloaded:
shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Transom-1.0.7.dmg
spctl -a -vvv -t install ~/Downloads/Transom-1.0.7.dmg
The second command should report source=Notarized Developer ID. Updates arrive in the app itself, signed the same way, and every version is listed in the changelog.
Nine times out of ten, Full Disk Access was granted but Transom wasn't restarted. Quit it from the menu bar and open it again. Still nothing? Check that the Transom switch in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Full Disk Access is actually on, and that the sender is on your VIP list.
That usually means the download was interrupted or unzipped by another tool. Delete it, download again from this page, and open the disk image directly. If it persists, email me and I'll look at it the same day.
Transom needs Automation access to Messages. System Settings → Privacy & Security → Automation → Transom → switch Messages on. If you clicked Don't Allow the first time, this is where you undo that.
Fully supported, and each display gets its own setting in Preferences → General → Displays. On a screen with no notch, Quiet leaves the top alone and Transom appears when you hover, when a card arrives, or when you drag a file up there. Tab adds a narrow tinted marker that sits in the menu bar if you'd rather see where it lives, and Off skips that display entirely. Clamshell and docked setups work, and cards follow the display you're working on unless you pin them to one.
Quit Transom from the menu bar and drag it from Applications to the Trash. Its settings and notification history live in one folder in ~/Library/Application Support/Transom, and Preferences has a button to clear any Keychain entries first. No installers, no kernel extensions. The one background piece is a small crash-recovery helper registered through macOS's own mechanism, and it leaves with the app.
Stuck on something that isn't here? Email blake@wiltonblake.com. A person reads it.