Why we built SideDock

The edges were empty

A Mac screen has four edges and four corners, and apart from the Dock and the menu bar, they do nothing. The pointer slams into them a hundred times a day. That felt like a waste of the easiest places on screen to reach: you can’t miss an edge, however fast you move.

The menu bar was full

Meanwhile everything useful had been crammed into the menu bar: a battery monitor, a clipboard manager, a timer, a weather app, a stats app. Each one is a separate download, a separate update, and on a notched MacBook, half of them end up hidden behind the camera anyway.

Widgets were supposed to help, but they live in Notification Center or on the desktop, which is always covered by windows. Nobody looks at them.

So: one app for the edges

SideDock puts docks at the edges. Push the pointer against one and it slides out, no click; move on and it slides away. Each dock holds whatever you reach for: apps, groups of apps, folders, and live widgets. More than fifty of them, from the clock to your Mac’s memory to your coding agents.

The notch got the same treatment: it shows what’s happening now, and opens into Home when you want more.

And then Pip showed up

We wanted the notch to be able to tell you things, not just show them. Your meeting in ten minutes. A Mac running hot. A break you’ve earned. That became Pip, a small companion who lives in the notch, says what matters, and keeps quiet during calls and full-screen video.

Pip turned out to be good company, so it learned to do things too, using the AI account you already have. (No new subscription. We checked: nobody wants another one.)

Pay once, keep it

SideDock is a Mac app that works on your Mac. No account, no tracking, no servers holding your stuff, and no subscription: you pay once and it’s yours. If that sounds like how Mac apps used to be, that’s the idea.