Reminders that know when not to remind you

How Notchpals stays quiet on calls, in full screen apps and while you are away, keeps each moment to its hour, and what it does not detect.

27 October 20266 min read

A reminder at the wrong moment does more harm than no reminder at all. It cuts into a call, pops up during a presentation, or tells you to eat lunch at ten in the morning, and each time it teaches you to dismiss it without reading. The fix is not a louder alarm. It is a reminder that checks what you are doing first.

Notchpals is built around that idea. Its characters hold back during calls, while a full screen app fills the screen they use, and while you are away from the keyboard. They only say what fits the hour and the state of your Mac, and the whole crew shares one modest daily budget. Here is exactly what it checks, and, just as useful to know, what it doesn't.

Quiet on calls and recordings

While the microphone or the camera is in use, the crew does not visit. That covers video calls, voice calls, recordings and anything else that has the mic or camera open. Nothing peeks out of the notch while your face is on someone else's screen.

A handy rule of thumb: if your Mac's camera light is on, or the microphone indicator is showing in the menu bar, the crew is holding its lines. When the call ends, the crew can come back. All Notchpals checks is whether the mic or camera is on; the sound and the picture never reach it.

Quiet in full screen

When the app in front is in full screen on the display the characters use, they wait. A presentation, a film, a game, a document you have put in full screen to concentrate: none of them get a character sliding down from the top.

It is the display the characters use that counts. On a MacBook with a notch, that is the built-in screen, even when an external display is set as the main one. With the lid closed, or on a Mac without a notch, it is the main display, where Notchpals draws its own black island. A full screen app on some other display doesn't quiet the crew. Why macOS blacks out the strip beside the notch in full screen is explained in full screen apps and the notch.

Waiting while you are away

If there has been no keyboard or mouse input for 2 minutes, Notchpals treats you as away. Nothing visits while you are gone, and the time away is not counted. That matters for the moments built on time at the Mac. Stand up comes after 55 minutes at the Mac in a row, and breathe after 90, and both are measured in time you actually spent there, so a long lunch is never mistaken for a long sit.

Come back after 15 minutes or more and your host, the crew member who handles greetings, says welcome back. If Snooze the sloth is your host, it sounds like this:

There is one honest limit here. Notchpals knows you are there from the keyboard and mouse. If you read a long article or watch a video in a window without touching anything for 2 minutes, it will think you have gone and stay quiet. Of the two mistakes it could make, that is the polite one.

Only what fits the moment

The second kind of context is what the characters actually say. Every moment has its own conditions, such as a window of hours or the state of the battery, and a character only brings it up when they are met.

Meals in their windows. Lunch comes between 12:30 and 2:30 PM by default. Set your own meal times in Settings and each meal comes within an hour either side of the time you chose. No lunch line at ten in the morning.
Sleep around your bedtime. Wind down comes in the hour before the bedtime you set (11 PM unless you change it), and the bedtime line only after it, if you are still at the Mac. No bedtime line at noon.
Battery lines only on battery. Battery low comes below 20 percent and only when the Mac is not charging. Plugged in or full, the battery character has nothing to say about it. The charging line only comes when you plug in after a low battery warning.
Weekdays and weekends. Plan the day is for weekday mornings, and wrap up for weekday evenings between 6 and 7:30 PM. The weekend line only comes on weekend days, after 45 minutes at the Mac.
Meetings only when there is one. A Schedule character warns you 3 to 10 minutes before a meeting on your calendar, if you have given it calendar access. It ignores events you declined, cancelled ones and all-day ones. No meeting, no line.
Once a day means once. Breakfast, lunch, bedtime, the first glass of water and the other timed moments come at most once a day, in their window.

The same rule applies to Later. Press it and the character comes back once, 20 minutes on, but only if the moment still applies. A lunch reminder you put off at 2:20 doesn't chase you into the evening.

One budget for the whole crew

Repeating reminders (water, posture checks, shoulders down, eye breaks, blink breaks, stretches) don't each run on their own timer. They share one daily budget across the crew, set in Settings as "Repeating reminders a day":

Setting	Repeating reminders a day	Spacing
Calm	4	at least about two hours apart
Normal (the default)	8	at least about an hour apart
Chatty	12	at least about 40 minutes apart

On top of that, there are at least 20 minutes between any two unprompted visits, whatever the setting. So a bigger crew does not mean more repeating reminders: it means the same budget shared more ways. With Blip for eyes, Melo for water and Sir Pounce for posture on Normal, the three of them share eight repeating visits a day, plus their once-a-day moments.

There is no way to set your own interval, such as water every 30 minutes. That is on purpose. A reminder every few minutes is exactly the kind people learn to ignore, so Calm, Normal and Chatty are the only dials.

Quiet on demand

Sometimes you know before Notchpals does that you need a quiet hour. The menu bar has two ways to get one:

Pause. Pause the crew for 1 hour or until tomorrow morning. The pair of eyes in the menu bar closes while the crew is quiet, so you can see at a glance whether anyone is going to visit.
A focus session. If Bolt, the Focus character, is in your crew, choose "Start a focus session" and pick 25 or 50 minutes. For the length of the session, Bolt's own moments are the only regular visits. A critical battery warning and a meeting about to start are the two exceptions that still get through.

What it does not detect

This part is worth being exact about, because it is where people assume too much.

Focus modes and Do Not Disturb. Notchpals does not read them. Turning on a Focus in Control Center quiets the notifications you have set it to, but it does not quiet the crew. If you want both, pause the crew from the menu bar as well. Setting up a Focus itself is covered in Focus modes on Mac.
Screen sharing. Notchpals can't tell when you are sharing your screen. On a call the mic or camera is usually in use, which keeps the crew quiet anyway. But if you are showing your screen to a room with no call running, pause first.
Quiet hours and app lists. There is no schedule of quiet hours, and no list of apps to stay quiet in. The rules above are the whole set. Many moments keep to daytime windows, but for a stretch you know must be quiet, use Pause.
What you actually did. It doesn't know whether you drank the water or stood up. It trusts your Done and moves on.

The idea behind all of it is simple: fewer reminders, at better moments, get followed. Why that matters more than how loud or frequent a reminder is gets its own post, why a character beats another notification.