Dragon: a file shelf that lives in the notch
A free macOS utility that turns the notch (or the menu bar) into a staging area for files, with compress, convert, share, AirDrop, tag and cloud-sync actions a click away.
Most file work on a Mac is a small detour. You grab something, open another app, convert or compress it, then drop it somewhere else. Dragon removes the detour: stage files once, then act on them from a panel that lives at the top-center of your screen.
Two ways in
Dragon runs as an accessory app, not a dock-first one. You pick how it shows up:
- Notch, a compact floating panel shaped around the notch region, with a smooth open and close animation
- Menu Bar, with a choice of icon styles
Drag files in to stage them, or click the staged area to import. Staged items show up as Finder-style tiles with Quick Look thumbnails, and you can drag them back out into Finder or any other app.
Actions
The current action set is intentionally short: Compress, Convert, Share, AirDrop, Tag and Cloud Sync. Each one can be hidden per user, so the panel only shows what you actually reach for.
Conversion without leaving the panel
Conversion stays within a category, and the coverage is broad:
- Images: PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, BMP, GIF, WebP
- Audio: WAV, AIFF, CAF, M4A, AAC, FLAC, MP3, OGG, AC3 and more
- Video: MP4, M4V, MOV, AVI, MKV, MPEG
- Documents: PDF, TXT, RTF, HTML, DOC, DOCX, ODT, Markdown and more
Under the hood
The UI is SwiftUI, hosted inside an AppKit NSPanel so it can float above everything without behaving like a normal window. Media conversion runs through a reviewed, bundled ffmpeg. Save panels, folder pickers, the share sheet and AirDrop are all native.
Dragon is free and open source, and version 1.0 is on GitHub Releases as a DMG.
Dragon Downloads, source and full README