Island

Dynamic Island for Windows

A liquid black pill at the top of your screen that shows what is happening right now and opens into a toolbox when you reach for it.

What it is

Island sits on top of every window, in the middle of the top edge. Collapsed, it is a small pill that tells you about music, downloads, the microphone, a screen recording. Rest the cursor on it, or push the cursor against the top edge, and it opens into a panel: clipboard history, a file shelf, text tools, an AI chat, screenshots, a command bar.

It never takes the keyboard focus away from the window you are typing in, so a click on a clipboard entry pastes it right where the caret is.

The pill is alive

The island itself is made of ferrofluid. Its lower edge reaches for the cursor, spikes to the music in the colour of the album cover, drops a bead when something good happens and sags when you are away.

Events show up on their own and fold away a moment later:

Music with an equalizer · dictation with a voice meter · reminders · downloads, not only from the browser · microphone and camera dots with a mute button · volume by mouse wheel · keyboard layout and Caps Lock · VPN with country and IP · screen recording · Steam downloads · OBS recording and stream · AI agents at work (Claude Code, Codex) · updates.

The time sits in the middle of the folded island, with the battery charge next to it on a laptop. And if the island gets in the way of your browser's tabs, turn on auto-hide: it leaves the screen and comes back when the cursor rests at the very top edge above it. Or name the programs it should keep away from, and it will hide only while one of them is in front.

Pick a character

Liquid island is the default. If you want company, 25 characters live in Settings → Character, each with a live preview: Pixel, a tail, an island on legs, a jellyfish, a hamster wheel, a campfire, a lens, Newton's cradle and more. They react to music, to the AI thinking, to finished actions and alarms, their eyes follow the real cursor, and they fall asleep when you are away. Pixel, Spark and Eyes are free; the others come with Island Pro.

Weather

A forecast tab: the weather now over a sky that matches it, the next 24 hours and a week ahead. The temperature also sits on the folded island while nothing else is going on there, and a card warns you about an hour before rain or snow starts. When it rains outside, the liquid island drips a little.

The forecast comes from MET Norway with no key and no sign-up. You choose the city once by name; it is never guessed from your network address. The weather is part of Island Pro.

Inside

Tools

• Screenshots of an area or the whole screen, to the clipboard and to a folder, with markup: arrows, boxes, a marker, text, blur for private data.
• Text from the screen (OCR). Windows' Russian and English recognizers are merged line by line.
• QR code from the screen and a color picker with a magnifier and colour history.
• Screen recording to MP4 (H.264 through Media Foundation, 30 or 60 frames per second, normal or high quality) or GIF, into a folder of your choice.
• Paste without formatting on a hotkey.
• A light theme for the island itself: dark, light, or whatever Windows uses.
• The island's size from 80 to 200%: on a big monitor it can be made bigger.
• Transparency of the folded and of the open island, each set on its own.
• The island in screenshots and recordings. By default screen captures leave it out; one setting shows it in screenshots, recordings and streams.
• Your own sound devices. You can choose whose volume the island controls and which microphone it mutes and records, when these are not the defaults of Windows: handy with a virtual mixer. The sound itself is not switched anywhere by this.
• Voice to text. Press the hotkey (or the button at the top of the open island), speak, press again: the text is on the clipboard (and, if you like, typed straight into the window you were in).
• Reminders and a timer that show up as a card with a sound and wait until you answer them; reminders can repeat on the days you name.
• A choice of player. When more than one is open, a button in the player picks the one the island shows and controls.
• Groups in the launcher. Drag one shortcut onto another and the two become a group; a group opens above the row. The plus adds a link: a site, or a command of another program (steam://run/…); its icon is found by itself (the site's or the app's) or picked from a file, and a right click changes the link.
• Hotkeys for shortcuts. Any shortcut of the launcher, a link included, can have a hotkey of its own (Settings → Hotkeys).
• Where the island stands. On the monitor of your choice, moved along its top edge; with a taskbar at the top of the screen it stands under it.
• The pill while music plays. The usual one, a wider one with the track's name and a thin bar of its time, or a mini player: the cover, the track, the bar and the buttons right in the pill.
• The song's words in time with the music. In the mini player and