Alcove
Alcove is a subtle, animated heads-up display that lives quietly in the background - bringing together music, now playing info, weather, and custom visuals to make your Mac feel more personal and alive.
Get to know Alcove
Who’s behind Alcove?
I’m Henrik - maker of Klack and Alcove. I actually started really early, coding in QBasic when I was around 13 and making turn-based question games. I got so obsessed with it that I developed a twitch in my eye, which turned out to just be eye strain. I used to play a lot of games, especially an MMO called Lineage. There was a design competition in the game, so I downloaded Photoshop and gave it a shot - somehow, I won.
That’s when I started thinking maybe I was good at design. That’s pretty much how coding and design both started for me. I leaned more into design after that, it came naturally, but I still wanted to build things. I was relying on a dev who kept disappearing for months, which just didn’t work for the kind of ambitious projects I wanted to make. So at 16, I started teaching myself to code. I didn’t follow the traditional route - no tutorials, no courses. I just went straight to the code, tried things, broke stuff, fixed it, and iterated. That’s how I learn best. Tutorials don’t really teach you to solve problems - they give you answers, but you never figure it out yourself. And if you can’t do that, you’re stuck building what’s already been done.
Since then, I’ve always been creating. In the beginning, I didn’t really have end goals - every project had massive scope creep. My first real project was a web armory for Lineage, where you could view your in-game items on a forum. It actually worked, and we sold a few copies. After that, everything was infinite scope and never completed. Then I pivoted to open source for a while. I worked quite a bit on Hyper Terminal - that’s also when I met some of the people now at Vercel. Back then, it was Zeit, and it wasn’t even a company yet, just a group working on open source. I wasn’t part of the Next.js stuff, but I helped out with Hyper. It wasn’t my project - it was Guillermo’s - but I was involved for a while.
Eventually, I changed my focus. I did iOS dev for companies for a while, but nothing of my own. Then I started working on a SaaS called Quill. You might’ve seen it on Twitter. It’s shut down now - the scope was too big, but I spent years on it. It was a way to build beautiful, interactive landing pages really easily. The idea was that if someone made a great app and didn’t know how to market it, they could use Quill instead of hiring someone for $20k to build that kind of site. While working on it, I came up with an idea for Klack, which originally was just a demo app for Quill. Klack would essentially create unique sounds for each keystroke, with 100+, or sometimes 150+ sounds per set. I never planned to take it seriously, but I ended up loving it more than expected, so I shipped it. Very quickly it became bigger than Quill. Eventually, after a short break I was ready to work on the next idea.
What’s Alcove and what’s so cool about it?
Alcove actually came out of another app I was building - Pling (coming soon). It started as a notch-based notification app, but then Notch Nook launched, and I realized we’d be competing for the exact same space. At first, I thought I’d just go head-to-head and make something better, but as I kept working on it, the idea got too big - too much for one app. I didn’t think most people would understand a product that tried to do both things at once. So I ended up splitting it. All the parts that already made sense and were ready to ship became Alcove, and the rest stayed in Pling for later. It wasn’t about rushing something out or copying anyone, it was just what felt right. I actually almost gave it all away at one point, like literally considered donating the full Alcove code to an open-source project, but I’m really glad I stuck with it.
Alcove is built around the idea of making your Mac feel more personal, more alive. It’s this elegant little utility that lives in the background and brings together a few things I’ve always wanted but never found in one place - music, now playing info, weather, custom visuals - all tied into a minimal, animated heads-up display.
What makes Alcove special is how passive and seamless it is. It never tries to sit in one fixed place on your screen. There’s no big window or bloated UI. It just gently fades in when you need it and fades out when you don’t. I put a lot of thought into avoiding the usual “tray app” behavior, especially the nightmare of dealing with the notch on modern Macs. It reacts to what you’re doing, instead of always being in the way.
One of the hardest parts about building Alcove was making it work on the lock screen. It’s something no other notch-based app does, and there’s a reason for that - it’s insanely complex. There’s zero documentation, no guides, and if you mess it up, it can literally lock you out of your Mac. Which it did. I got locked out four times while trying to get it working. But it was important to me. I wanted Alcove to feel like it was part of the system, like something Apple could’ve built themselves. Getting that lock screen behavior right, without disabling any system security, felt like a personal milestone. I still remember the first time it worked - I was so happy, because it meant I didn’t have to compromise. That’s probably one of the features I’m most proud of. It took forever, but now it just feels like magic.
The feedback has been amazing. One of my favorite things is how the app has started to grow through the community. I’ve got a small but super engaged group on Discord, and I started pulling in feature ideas directly from them. One person suggested a gradient slider in the music player, and now it’s everyone’s favorite thing. Seeing something go from a quick idea to a polished part of the app - that’s the best part of making software like this. When you’re building something with passion, you tend to attract people who care just as much.
Tool Stack of Alcove
What’s under Alcove’s hood? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
From the start, I didn’t want Alcove to ask for any weird permissions, especially not full keyboard access like other apps often do. So instead of reacting to key presses, it listens to system changes for things like brightness and volume. It’s more complex, but it means no creepy permissions and no unnecessary prompts. If nothing changes, Alcove stays quiet - on purpose. One of the biggest challenges was handling things like headphones that auto-adjust your volume or adaptive brightness kicking in. It took a while to figure out, but the new version handles it cleanly - no false triggers, no extra noise. Solving stuff like that in a subtle, elegant way is honestly my favorite part.
The app itself is written in Swift, built in Xcode, and I try to keep things pretty bare-bones - no unnecessary dependencies. It doesn’t actually save you much time in the long run, and at some point, they tend to break anyway. Writing everything myself just makes it easier to maintain.
Since Alcove isn’t on the App Store, I also built my own licensing server using Laravel, which is still one of my favorite frameworks for PHP. It handles trials now, and I’m planning to add cloud-connected features in future versions, so the apps can talk to each other and work together in smarter ways.
I’ve always been really into good developer tools too. I used to use Nova, which felt like a modern successor to Coda, but it didn’t really catch on, unfortunately. Not a lot of extensions, not much community around it. Zed is another editor I’ve looked into - it’s moving really fast and feels like it could’ve gone big. It’s a shame it didn’t.
Right now, I’m mostly using a custom setup, but I still think Xcode is one of the most well-designed pieces of software out there. Klack’s internal code editor, for example, was heavily inspired by it. Very focused, clean, and powerful. You can even run scripts inside it - super useful for quick automation.
For database management, I’ve been using Postico on the Mac. It honestly looks like something Apple would’ve built themselves. It’s beautifully done, really polished. Only downside is the price, and I get the sense the market for it is pretty niche, but I love it anyway.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
Right now, I’m mostly using a custom setup, but I still think Xcode is one of the most well-designed pieces of software out there.
I’ve always loved Sketch - it’s native, clean, and just feels right. I get why people love Figma, especially for web design, but it’s not native. The one big benefit is that what you design is already in the browser, so it looks the same when you ship it. With Sketch, I’ve had perfect vectors break the moment they hit the web. But since I work solo, I don’t need collaboration tools, so I still stick with Sketch.
That said, I rarely do mockups. I usually go straight into code - it’s faster, more accurate, and I know exactly how it’ll look. With design tools, things often seem right in theory but fall apart in practice. When I built Alcove, I actually had to go back and create designs later, just for the promo material.
Vue and Vite is my go-to frontend stack for web-based projects. Super beginner-friendly, but also scales up to professional-level work. Everything about it is clean and well thought out. I used React in the past, like when building Hyper, but it always felt like I was working against it. Vue just feels more elegant.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
My editor of choice for web dev is Nova. It’s native, lightweight, inspired by Xcode, and lets me run scripts and manage projects cleanly. Not as popular as VS Code, but I love it. Project management all runs through GitHub Projects. Everything goes through there - issues, releases, changelogs. I can’t manage it from my phone though, so I just text myself notes when I’m out. I use Arc as my main browser. It’s not perfect, but being able to switch between app workspaces -Klack, Alcove, etc. - is a huge plus. Chrome used to make me feel like I lost half my life when tabs disappeared.
For email, I switched from Gmail to iCloud Plus - it’s simple, just works, and only a few bucks a month. I also tried Minestream, which is gorgeous and built by an ex-Apple dev, but it only supports Gmail. For window management, I use Magnet, and I actually took some UI cues from it when designing app permissions. Loop and Sleeve were also big inspirations - especially for Alcove.
In general, I get inspired by many tools. I really believe that everything is a iteration, but if you understand why something works and repurpose it intentionally, it becomes its own thing. I think it's the best way to do stuff, and I think that Steve Jobs really understood this.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I’m currently working on my third app, Pling, which will tie into Alcove and Klack as part of a growing ecosystem of carefully connected, purpose-driven tools. Until then, check out Alcove, join the Discord community and let me know what you think!
Now, discover Alcove for yourself
Huge thanks to Henrik for sharing the story behind Alcove and the details on the building blocks that make it such a great tool. Now go install it yourself and make your notch playful and alive!