The notch bar

Finexia runs in a window. The notch bar is the other half: a small surface at the top of the screen that says who is working, lets you ask Kam a question, and keeps the control that stops everything one press away — without bringing the whole workspace back.

Still missingRead this first. There is code behind this page, on a machine, on a branch that has not been pushed: no sealed build carries the notch, no handover report covers it, and the latest bench manifest holds no screenshot of it. This site cannot point at any of that, so it claims none of it. Every part below is labelled CONCEPT, which here means the shape is described and the proof is not public yet. The interactive bar on the home page says the same thing in its own words: it is a reconstruction, not a screenshot.

#What the notch is

It is a control, not a window. It lives in its own process and its own render tree, and it shares no state with the main window: what it shows is broadcast to it by the window that actually knows what the agents are doing. Inventing a state inside the bar would produce two, and the more visible one would be the false one.

On a Mac with a hardware cutout it sits around it. On a Mac without one it takes an honest capsule instead. It never draws a fake cutout, and it never paints black bands beside a real one.

#Three shapes, and one panel that gains a block

The bar has three views. Collapsed is the resting shape. Glance is a compact summary that appears after an event or under the cursor. Open is the full panel. A piloting session is not a fourth shape: the open panel gains one block and keeps its size.

#Open and close

One rule governs all of it: an explicit gesture always wins against an automatism. Hovering, an event from Kam, the end of a delay are automatisms. A click, Escape, the pin are gestures. An automatism never undoes what a gesture did — that is the only way an interface stays predictable when it is driven by mouse and keyboard at the same time.

1. Click the bar to open the panel. It stays open because you asked for it, not because the cursor happens to be there.
2. Press Escape, or use the collapse control, to close it. A deliberate close remembers itself for as long as the cursor is still on the bar, so it does not spring back open under your hand.
3. Move away and the panel folds back on its own, after a short delay. The delay exists so that crossing the bar on the way to a menu does not make it flicker.

#Ask Kam

The open panel carries a field. What you type there goes to Kam, the host, in the main window — the bar sends a command and the window decides. That is the same boundary as everywhere else in the product: the bar asks, the desk answers, and no second source of truth appears.

#Voice

A round control next to the field starts dictation, and a second one decides whether Kam answers out loud or stays silent. Both are toggles with a visible pressed state, because a microphone you cannot tell is open is a microphone you do not trust.

#Active agents

The bar shows who is working, by their owl and their colour. The colour comes from the role, written once in the core, so the same agent is the same colour in the bar, on the card and in the thread. State is never carried by colour alone: the accessible name of each owl says the verb as well, and the verbs are the eight the core declares — idle, listening, thinking, working, connecting, speaking, done, blocked.

#Deliverables

When a role finishes something, the bar says which role and what it produced, then goes back to resting. Opening the deliverable itself is one control away: the panel can reach the workspace, or bring the desk window back. The bar never renders a document — it points at one.

#Bouna, and what a piloting session shows

Bouna is the pilot role. When a session is running, the open panel gains one block: who is driving, the host it is allowed to touch, the next action, and a count of gestures against the ceiling declared for that session. The next action is announced before it happens — an action done and then reported is not an action you consented to.

The target is written as a host, never as a full address. A path carries session identifiers and a query carries tokens, and this surface sits above everything else on the screen. When a session asks for something outside the list declared when it opened, the request is refused, and the refusal is written down.

LimitNothing on this site shows a piloting session running. No bench asset records one, so the home page draws the block and says in plain words that it claims nothing about an observed run. What you see there is the declared shape of a permission, not a recording of a machine being driven.

#Stop

Stop lives in the panel, in the same place, whatever the desk is doing. It does not move into the piloting block when a session starts, and it does not grey out. It used to: it was disabled on the count of running agents alone, and a piloting session runs none — so the control went grey at exactly the moment something was actually moving on the machine. A Stop that greys out at the worst moment is not a Stop.

#Automatic previews

The bar can open a glance by itself when something lands — a desk starting work, a deliverable arriving, a refusal, a piloting session taking the keyboard. That behaviour is a setting: turn automatisms off and the bar only ever moves when you move it. It is one flag, and it is read by the state machine rather than scattered through the view.

#Pinning

The pin holds the panel open against everything automatic: the fold delay, the cursor leaving, an event arriving. It is a toggle, it shows its pressed state, and it is the clearest expression of the rule above — a gesture the operator made is not something a timer gets to undo.

#macOS permissions

Dictation needs the microphone permission, and macOS asks for it the first time, from the system, not from Finexia. Nothing else in the bar asks for a permission: it does not read the screen, it does not need accessibility control, and it does not ask to see other applications. A piloting session is the one part that acts outside Finexia, and what it may touch is declared before it opens rather than granted once and forgotten.

#A Mac without a physical notch

Nothing changes except the resting shape. With a cutout, the collapsed form matches its measured width so that it never spills onto the menu bar and never paints the black bands a real cutout does not have. Without one, it takes a small capsule instead — simulating hardware would look exactly like what it is. External displays are handled the same way: the bar centres on the screen that carries the cutout, not on the desktop, so plugging in a second monitor does not leave the panel beside the notch instead of under it.

#Accessibility

Every control has a name, and an icon-only control has a title as well. The shape changes are box changes, never a zoom: nothing is scaled up and down under the cursor. Under Reduce Motion the arrival shape is set at once instead of being animated. Under Reduce Transparency the blur is dropped and the surface becomes denser — it does not become a black plate, which would remove the object rather than make it readable. State is never carried by colour alone.

#Privacy

The bar shows what is already on your machine. It holds no key, it reaches no server of ours, and the control plane behind this website never sees a portfolio, a thesis, a journal or a market series. What a piloting session is allowed to reach is named before it starts, shown while it runs, and refused outside that list.

#Troubleshooting

• The bar sits in the middle of the screen instead of at the top: it is placed from a measurement of the display, and it must be placed before it is shown rather than corrected afterwards.
• The panel is open at full width but folded to the collapsed height, cutting the content into a black band: width and height belong to one shape and are set together, never separately.
• The collapsed form is far wider than the cutout and reads as a black bar across the top of the screen: the resting width comes from the measured cutout, not from a constant written next to it.
• Dictation does nothing: macOS has not been granted the microphone permission, and the request comes from the system on first use.

Still missingThese four are the failure shapes this page exists to name. None of them is shown anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate: a broken state put on a marketing page is a broken state being advertised. When a sealed build carries the notch, this page will carry screenshots of the working states and a version number, and the label will move off CONCEPT.

#What is described here, and what is claimed

• CONCEPTCONCEPTAn explanation of a shape, with nothing behind it that this site can point to. On this page it carries one extra meaning, written above: the code exists on an unpushed branch, and an unsealed source may remove a claim but never add one.
• CONCEPTThree shapes and their boundsDescribed from the registry that holds them. No sealed build has been observed rendering them, and no bench asset shows any of the three.
• CONCEPTAsk Kam, dictation, and spoken answersDescribed. Nothing on this site shows a question typed into the bar, a dictation session, or an answer read out loud.
• CONCEPTA piloting session and its permissionThe declared shape of a permission, not a recording. No session has been observed driving a machine, and the home page says so where it draws the block.
• CONCEPTStop, present and never greyed outDescribed, including the case it was fixed for. Nobody on this site has watched a running desk stop from the bar.