Your first day with Notchpals: setup, the trial and what to expect

The first time you open Notchpals, there is no window full of settings. Blip, a wide-eyed alien, appears in the notch and walks you through setup right there, in four steps: hello, picking your crew, timing, and done, with a sample reminder to answer along the way. Your trial starts when you finish, and from then on your crew visits now and then through the day, keeping quiet while you are busy.

This post walks through that first day: each step of setup, what the menu bar shows, how to try other characters, and what happens when the trial is over.

Setting up in the notch

On a MacBook, setup happens in the notch itself. On a Mac without one, or with the built-in screen closed, Notchpals draws a small black island centered at the top of your main display, and setup happens there instead.

1. Hello

Blip says hello and introduces itself. Blip is always in your crew, looking after Eyes, so you will be seeing a lot of each other.

2. Pick your crew

Next you pick two more areas from the other nine: Water, Meals, Posture, Movement, Sleep, Focus, Self-care, Tech care and Schedule. Each area has its own characters with very different voices, from a shy ghost to a chili that shouts about lunch. A good first pick is the two habits you slip on most often. If you can't decide, how to pick your Notchpals crew goes through every area and who looks after it.

Don't worry about getting it right. You can change the crew any time.

3. Timing

This step tells the crew about your day:

• Bedtime. The Sleep characters use it for the wind down in the hour before, and for a bedtime visit if you are still at the Mac afterward. It is 11 PM unless you change it.
• Lunch and dinner. Meal reminders come within an hour either side of the times you set. Breakfast and snack times can be set later in Settings.
• Calendar access. Only Schedule characters use it, and only if you allow it. Notchpals then reads only when your next meeting starts, never its title, its people or its notes. If you have not picked a Schedule character, you can simply say no.
• Birthday. Optional. If you set it, your host wishes you a happy birthday.
• Start at login. Worth turning on, so the crew is there every morning without you having to open anything.

Then comes a sample reminder to answer. It works like a real visit: the island opens, a character slides down, and a speech bubble shows its name and its line, with two buttons, Later and Done. On a real reminder, Done gets you a thank you from the character, and Later means it comes back once, 20 minutes later, if it still applies. A second Later lets it go.

4. Done

That is setup finished. Your crew is in place, and your trial starts now.

The trial starts when setup finishes

The trial includes every feature and lasts 24 hours from the moment you finish setting up your crew, not from when you download the app. So it is worth setting up at the start of a normal working day. That way the trial covers a morning, a lunch, an afternoon slump and an evening, and you see the crew at the moments it was made for.

During the trial, use the Mac as you normally would and answer visits honestly: Done when you did the thing, Later when you can't right now. Notchpals has no idea whether you actually drank the water. It trusts your Done, and it keeps no log or stats.

What the menu bar shows

Notchpals lives in the menu bar as a pair of eyes, and the eyes shut whenever the crew is quiet. Sometimes that is your doing, with a pause. More often it happens on its own: during a call or a recording, when an app has the mic or camera on; when you have an app in full screen on the notch's display; and when you have left the keyboard and mouse alone for 2 minutes. So if the eyes are shut during your first video call, that is the crew being polite, not a fault.

From the menu bar you can:

• Pause the crew for 1 hour or until tomorrow morning. Useful before a presentation, because Notchpals does not detect screen sharing or Focus modes.
• Open "Your crew" to see who is in it and make changes.
• Start a focus session of 25 or 50 minutes, if you have Bolt, the Focus character, in your crew. For those minutes the other characters stand down. Bolt can still speak, and so can a critical battery warning or a meeting that is about to start.

In Settings, the control you are most likely to want is "Repeating reminders a day": Calm, Normal (the default) or Chatty. It sets one shared budget for water, posture checks, eye breaks, stretches and blinks across the whole crew. If day one feels too busy or too quiet, change this before you change the characters.

What the rest of the day looks like

What you see depends on your crew and the time of day, but a typical first day goes something like this.

Eye breaks from Blip come now and then, drawn from the daily budget and spaced apart, counting only the time you are at the Mac. If you have a Water character, the first glass of the day comes between 8 and 11 AM, after your first 15 minutes at the Mac. Lunch comes near the lunch time you set. A Movement character waits for 55 minutes of unbroken time at the Mac before telling you to stand up. In the evening, a Sleep character starts the wind down in the hour before your bedtime. There are always at least 20 minutes between visits the crew starts on its own.

One crew member is your host. The host says welcome back when you return after 15 minutes or more away, so if Blip is your host, coming back from lunch might look like this:

BlipOh good, you're back! I counted the dust. Eleven specks.

Two other things to try on day one. Click a character while it is on screen to poke it, and see what it has to say about that. And hover over the notch for a moment to get a peek. On the second morning, the host says good morning the first time you sit down at the Mac between 5 AM and noon.

If anything about what the app reads bothers you, what Notchpals knows about you sets it out plainly. In short, there is no account and no analytics, and what it reads to time a reminder stays on the Mac.

Trying other characters in Browse

The Browse window is where you meet the rest of the characters. You can Try in notch any of them, so you see it peek out of your own notch before you decide. From Browse you can also Add to crew to put a character in charge of its area, or Make host to change who greets you.

Buying Notchpals includes Blip plus two characters you pick, and characters are bought in Browse. A few characters (Achaar, Chintu, Chui Mui, Grandpa Ravi, Nani and Pinky Aunty) are add-ons only and are never among the two you pick, but any of them can be added later.

When the trial ends

When the trial is over, your crew rests until you buy. Nothing is deleted: your crew, your host, your bedtime and meal times all stay exactly as you left them, and the characters pick up where they left off once you buy. One license key works on up to 3 Macs, and if it turns out not to suit you, refunds are available within seven days.

The best way to judge it is the way it is meant to be used: set it up, pick the two habits that trip you up, and get on with your day. If by the evening you have had a few glasses of water and looked across the room more than usual without thinking about it, the crew is doing its job.