The short version

What you actually get.

Notes that land in your vault

Type through the call, right next to the invite. Every note mirrors itself as a real .md file with YAML frontmatter — Obsidian-ready. Recurring meetings get per-occurrence notes, so last week’s standup never overwrites this week’s.

Claims its corner

Every window your front app has open gets pushed out of its lane — not just the one you’re clicking into. The space is reserved, not floated on top. Part of the desktop, same as the Dock.

Shrinks away, stays useful

Auto-hide collapses it to a thin sliver that still shows a live meeting’s join button and countdown. Never gone, always doing something — always in view without a click.

One-tap meeting join

Detects Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, and FaceTime links in the location, URL, or notes field. Rewrites to the native app scheme when installed — no browser detour.

It’s your actual calendar

Reads, creates, renames, and deletes real events via EventKit. Drag to reschedule. Drop a file or text selection to time-block. All-day events get their own row.

Always knows what’s next

Next free 30 minutes: 14:30 — right in the header, so you don’t have to scan the day to find a gap.

Speaks your Mac’s language

German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, automatically.

Wherever your setup lives

Left or right, whichever display — pick the screen in Preferences. Unplug a monitor and it follows to the next one.

Local-first, no account

Calendar events and notes stay on your Mac. The only network calls are license validation and update checks. No analytics, no tracking, no telemetry.

How it compares

Where SideSchedule actually differs.

Most calendar apps show you your day, then get out of the way. SideSchedule stays — and it’s the only one that turns a meeting into a note in your own files while the meeting is happening.

App	Price	Reserves space	Notes to your files	No account needed
SideSchedule	€12.99 once	✓	✓	✓
Sidebar	Setapp subscription	✓	✕	✕
Notion Calendar	Free	✕	✕	✕
Dato	$18 once	✕	✕	✓
Itsycal	Free	✕	✕	✓
Fantastical	Free / from $4.75 mo	✕	✕	✕
Meeter	Free	✕	✕	✓

Prices and features as published by each app, checked September 2026. Always confirm on the maker’s own site before buying.

How it works

Always there, so you never have to switch to it.

It reserves the space

Apple never gave regular apps a way to claim screen space like the Dock can. So SideSchedule fakes it: any window that tries to slide under the sidebar gets nudged back out. You’ll never notice it happening.

Your windows live here

Dock Menu bar SideSchedule

Other windows physically can’t cover the strip — the space is reserved, not floated on top.

One permission does it

Accessibility, under System Settings → Privacy & Security. It’s the only thing SideSchedule asks for besides Calendar access — and the reason the whole trick works.

System Settings Privacy & Security Accessibility

One toggle, one time. No background daemons and no kernel extensions.

Notes become files

Because the sidebar is always there, it’s the one place you can type notes without leaving the call. Every note saves as a standalone .md file into a folder you pick.

---
title:    "Weekly sync"
event_date: 2026-09-04
event_time: 14:00–14:30
calendar: Work
tags:     [meeting]
source:   sideschedule
---

Typed during the call. Read by Obsidian, Logseq, or any local AI tool.

Plain Markdown with YAML frontmatter — no glue code needed.

The money bit

Free to try. Cheap to keep, forever.

Trial

Free for 14 days

Everything unlocked. No account, no credit card, and no countdown emails guilt-tripping you into buying.

Download the trial

License

€12.99 once

Pay once, keep every update after. I won’t turn this into a subscription later. That trick is played out anyway.

Two Macs per licence. Swapping machines frees a slot again.

Buy license — €12.99

Built and supported by one person, in Graz. Questions before buying? 4ingoj.apps@gmail.com

Lemon Squeezy handles the payment — they’re the merchant of record, so there’s no extra account and no surprise line item you won’t recognise later.

First launch

Two minutes, no App Store.

Download & drag to Applications

Grab the latest release from GitHub. Open the disk image, drag SideSchedule into Applications, done.

Launch and allow access

Say yes when it asks for Calendar and Accessibility access. That one click is what makes the whole reserved-space trick work.

Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple — Gatekeeper lets it straight through, no right-click dance needed.

Questions

The ones that actually come up.

Does it work with my calendar?

SideSchedule reads from Apple Calendar (EventKit), so anything Apple Calendar can see — iCloud, Google, Exchange, CalDAV — shows up in the sidebar. No extra sync, no account.

Why does it need Accessibility access?

That's the only way macOS lets an app keep other windows from sliding under the sidebar. The Dock gets its reserved strip from the system itself; a regular app has no such API, so Accessibility is the only route left. SideSchedule never reads window content — it only repositions frames.

What happens after the 14-day trial?

The sidebar stops appearing and the app opens to the activation window instead. Nothing is deleted: your notes, settings and exported .md files all stay exactly where they are, and the sidebar returns the moment you enter a key. No reinstall needed.

Is my data sent anywhere?

No. Your calendar events and notes stay on your Mac. The only network calls are license validation (Lemon Squeezy) and update checks (GitHub). There's no analytics, no tracking, no telemetry.

Can I get a refund?

Lemon Squeezy handles payments as merchant of record. If something's genuinely broken, reach out and we'll figure it out — but the 14-day trial exists so you can be sure before you pay.

Does it work on multiple monitors?

Yes. You pick which display the sidebar lives on, and it follows that screen. If you unplug the monitor, it moves to the next one automatically.

How many Macs does one licence cover?

Two. Activate on both — a desktop and a laptop, say. “Deactivate this Mac” in Preferences frees the slot again, so replacing a machine doesn’t cost you an activation.

Does it work with fullscreen apps?

Not properly yet. A native-fullscreen window takes the whole screen and the sidebar ends up drawn over it instead of shrinking it. That one sits on the roadmap under Exploring. Everywhere else, including a window you have manually dragged to full size, the reserved strip holds.

What happens to my notes if I stop using it?

Nothing. They are plain .md files in the folder you picked, readable by Obsidian, Logseq or any text editor. There is no export step because there is nothing to export from.

What comes next

Where this is going, written down so you can judge it.

Buy it for what it does today, not for this list. Nothing below is a promise or a date — plans change, and some of these will turn out to be bad ideas. If one of them is your reason to buy, wait until it ships; every licence already sold gets it for free when it does.

Next up

Richer note frontmatter

Attendees, location and the join link land in the YAML header. Attendee names as [[wiki links]], so your vault builds a people graph without any glue code.

Last time’s note

A recurring meeting is about to start and the note from its previous occurrence comes up beside it. The per-occurrence keys already exist, so this is mostly display work.

Open action items

Every unchecked box across all your notes in one list, so nothing agreed in a call sits forgotten in a file.

Planned

Per-calendar note templates

A standing agenda for the weekly, a blank page for everything else — picked by the calendar the event came from.

Automation hooks

A URL scheme so Raycast, Alfred or Shortcuts can drop a time block into the sidebar without you touching it.

The rest of the week

Tomorrow, and the days after, readable from the strip — without giving up the single-day focus that makes it useful.

Exploring

Native fullscreen

Today the sidebar draws over a fullscreen app instead of shrinking it. Solving that properly needs a different approach from the one that works everywhere else.

On-device meeting summary

A first draft of the note written by a model running on your Mac. It ships only if it stays local — otherwise it doesn’t ship.

Where the week went

A weekly Markdown file totalling the hours by calendar, written into the same folder as your notes.

Missing something? The order of this list follows what people ask for. Open an issue on GitHub

My calendar kept losing to every other window.
Not anymore.

See it in action