Building the notch
How Aria went from a floating blob to a panel that opens out of the notch, and what I learned by getting it wrong first.
Story, 2 min read
The first version of Aria wasn’t in the notch at all. It was a small glowing blob that floated on top of everything on your screen. In screenshots it looked great. In real life it was a little annoying. It sat over things you were trying to read, you were never quite sure where it would be, and after a few days I caught myself dragging it out of the way more often than I was actually looking at it. A tool that’s supposed to save your attention shouldn’t be competing for it.
Moving into the notch fixed almost all of that at once. The notch is always in the same spot, it’s already dead space, and your eyes cross it dozens of times an hour without you noticing. When Aria is collapsed, it’s just a small orb sitting beside it. When an agent needs you, the orb changes, and that’s usually enough to pull your eye up for half a second. Hover or click, and a black panel slides out of the notch with your sessions inside.
Getting that panel right took longer than I expected, and most of the time went into removing things. My early versions tried to show everything: logs, diffs, timelines, a little history of every step each agent had taken. It was basically a full dashboard squeezed into a space the size of a sticky note, and it was exhausting to look at. The version that finally felt right shows much less. Who’s running, who’s waiting on you, and one clear thing you can do about each. Everything else is a click deeper, there when you want it and out of the way when you don’t.
Somewhere in that process, three rules settled in that I now check every screen against. The first is to be calm by default. Only the orb is allowed to glow, and everything else stays quiet until something actually needs you. The second is to be real, not staged. Aria shows real agent names, real commands, and real file names, never a polished fake version of what’s happening. The third is to stay local first, so nothing leaves your Mac unless you decide it should.
None of those rules came from a plan. They came from building the wrong thing a few times and noticing what bothered me about it. I suspect that’s how most of Aria will keep getting made, and I’ll keep writing about it here as it does.