Alcove at the Islands: the apartments, and the Mac app mix-up

#What Alcove at the Islands actually is

Alcove at the Islands is an apartment community in Gilbert, Arizona, at 1300 W Warner Road, in the Islands neighborhood built around the town’s man-made lakes. Public listings show it was acquired and rebranded by P.B. Bell, a Phoenix-area property management company, which is why older signage and newer signage do not match. That is the thing most people mean when they type the phrase into a search box.

I build Mac software for a living, not apartments, so I am going to be honest about my limits here: I cannot quote you a current rent, a floor plan, a pet policy or a move-in special, and you should not trust any blog that pretends to. Those numbers change weekly. The right move is to open the community’s own leasing page or a listing site like Apartments.com or Zillow, filter for Gilbert 85233, and call the office. That is a thirty-second answer that a page like this can only get wrong.

So if renting is why you are here, that is the whole answer, and you can stop reading. Everything past this point is about the other Alcove, the one that lives on a Mac.

#How the name collides with Mac software

The reason a query about an Arizona apartment lands on a page about MacBooks is a plain naming coincidence, stacked twice. First, “Alcove” is the name of a small paid Mac app in a category I work in every day: apps that put the space around the MacBook notch to work. Second, that whole category exists because of Apple’s Dynamic Island, and an apartment community named “at the Islands” sits one preposition away from it. Search engines see the same tokens and sometimes guess wrong.

I am not neutral about this, and it is fair to say so up front. I build NotchBay, one of the paid apps that competes with Alcove. That means I have an obvious interest in you knowing the software exists. I have tried to keep this page useful even if you never touch a notch app, and to keep the apartment half pointed at people who know that world better than I do.

Here is the clean split, so nobody wastes another click in the wrong place.

Same three words, three unrelated things. The rest of this guide is the third column, bottom two rows.

#Alcove the Mac app, and the island it draws

Apple ships the Dynamic Island on the iPhone, where the camera cutout turns into a live status area: music curls around it, timers pin to it, activities expand out of it. Apple has never shipped that on the Mac. As of macOS Tahoe (26), the MacBook notch is passive hardware. The menu bar just wraps around it and macOS gives the cutout no job beyond housing the camera.

A category of third-party apps fills that gap. They anchor a small interactive panel to the notch so it can show now playing, your next calendar event, AirPods battery, timers and more, the way the iPhone island does. Alcove is one of these apps. It is paid, it leans minimal, and it is known for clean animation rather than a giant feature list. I would not try to recite its exact current feature set from memory, because these apps ship often. Check Alcove’s own site for what it does today, and if you want my side-by-side read of where it and my app differ, I wrote NotchBay and Alcove compared.

Alcove is far from the only one. The names you will run into include NotchNook, DynamicLake, boring.notch, TopNotch, Atoll and my own NotchBay. None of them is the first, and none is the only option. They split roughly into free and paid: free apps handle music, timers and basic activities well, while paid apps earn their price on the harder, permission-heavy features like call controls, searchable clipboard trays and dictation.

If safety is your worry, that is a reasonable instinct with any small utility that asks for system permissions. The reputable ones are either notarized by Apple or open source, and you should download only from the official site or repository. I dug into that exact question for one popular free option in is boring.notch safe, and the logic there applies to the whole category, Alcove included.

#If you wanted a notch app, not an apartment

Say the apartment was never the point and you landed here chasing the software. Here is the short path, and none of it requires my app.

1. Confirm your hardware. You need a MacBook with a notch: any MacBook Pro from the 2021 redesign on, or any MacBook Air from the M2 model in 2022 on. On an Intel MacBook or an external monitor, the island has no cutout to anchor to.
2. Decide free or paid. If now-playing controls and a timer are all you want, install a free one and stop. If you want call controls, a clipboard tray or dictation, that is the paid tier.
3. Install and grant permissions as you go. A good notch app asks for each macOS permission only when you switch on the feature that needs it. Accessibility unlocks call controls, Calendar powers the meeting chip, the microphone is for dictation. Skip any of them and you lose only that one feature.
4. Live with it for a day. Keep Activity Monitor’s Energy tab open. Your own numbers beat any marketing claim, mine included.

How much these things can be reshaped varies a lot between apps, from fixed layouts to fairly deep control over what shows and where. If tailoring the island to your own habits matters to you, I collected what is actually adjustable across the category in Dynamic Island customization on the Mac.

My own app, for disclosure and nothing more here: I build NotchBay, a paid notch app for macOS 26. It does live activities, Zoom and Google Meet call controls, a clipboard tray that keeps about 60 recent clips with OCR search inside screenshots, on-device dictation and drop-to-share through your own Google Drive. It is $19 one-time with a 3-day trial, signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple. It needs a notched MacBook and macOS 26, and the Google Meet bridge works in Chromium browsers, not Safari yet. That is the honest shape of it, and the pitch waits until the end of this page.

#Frequently asked questions