Main project · My own product
Zenit
The dynamic island for Windows.
A desktop app that lives at the very top of your screen: it shows what’s playing on Spotify, TIDAL or YouTube Music, the weather, currencies, your clocks and system alerts, and it moves with smooth spring animations. No accounts, no telemetry and no admin rights required.
winget install Danidev.ZenitComing soon
- lines of C# and XAML
- 14,000+lines of C# and XAML
- third-party NuGet packages
- 0third-party NuGet packages
- swipeable pages in the island
- 8swipeable pages in the island
- languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese
- 3languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese
The idea
What’s happening, at the very top of your screen.
On phones, the top of the screen became the place where everything happens: the song that’s playing, a timer, a call. Windows has nothing like it. To see what’s playing or how much time a timer has left, you have to open another window and lose focus.
Zenit was built to fill that gap. It’s a black island attached to the top edge of the screen that expands when you need it and gets out of the way when you don’t. The name comes from the zenith, the highest point in the sky, right above you: that’s where the island lives.
I designed, built, documented and shipped it end to end as my own product: from the animation physics and the Windows API integration to the website, the promo video, distribution and the security of every release.
Features
Everything that matters, at a glance.
Swipe the expanded island to change pages, or let it tell you on its own when something changes.
Music
Spotify, TIDAL and YouTube Music (and any player, if you want) with album art, title, a seekable progress bar and controls. The equalizer reacts to the real audio.
Synced lyrics
The line being sung, right on time, from LRCLIB, over a blurred album-art background. Close the island and the compact one keeps showing the lyrics.
Timer and stopwatch
A live activity: the countdown stays visible in the compact island.
System HUDs
Volume (scroll the mouse wheel over the island), battery charging and level, and camera and mic privacy dots.
Weather
Your location or any city in the world, with an hourly forecast and animated vector icons.
Currencies
300+ currencies and cryptocurrencies with their daily change.
World clocks
Up to 4 cities with analog faces that switch between day and night.
Community widgets
Data from any public API with a plain JSON file. No code, and safe by design.
Gestures
Hover or click to expand, swipe to change songs or pages, or use your touchpad.
Two looks
A classic notch attached to the top edge with concave curves, or a floating island.
Discreet
Hidden from screenshots, recordings and screen sharing, and it steps aside for full-screen games and videos.
Configurable
A Windows 11-style settings panel for language, size, position, color and pages.
On screen
This is how it looks on your desktop.
Real screenshots of the app, taken from its demo.
Engineering
Native, lightweight and handcrafted.
No third-party frameworks: every piece is written on top of .NET 10, WPF and Windows’ own APIs.
- 01
Custom spring physics
Animations use a damped spring integrated with fixed 240 Hz substeps. They can be interrupted at any time without losing velocity, which is why they feel physical rather than scripted.
- 02
Gestures with momentum
A velocity tracker measures pointer movement over the last 100 ms. On release, the island inherits that velocity and decides whether to change song or page.
- 03
Deep Windows integration
Music is read through the official Windows API (GlobalSystemMediaTransportControls), the equalizer queries the Core Audio meter, and the window is excluded from captures with SetWindowDisplayAffinity.
- 04
Respects what you’re doing
It detects full-screen apps (a game, a presentation, a video) and steps aside on its own so it never gets in the way.
public void Step(double dt)
{
// Euler semi-implícito con subpasos fijos:
// estable aunque el frame tarde.
while (dt > 0)
{
var h = Math.Min(StepSize, dt);
var force = -Stiffness * (Value - Target)
- Damping * Velocity;
Velocity += force * h;
Value += Velocity * h;
dt -= h;
}
}- src/Zenit
- Animation/Spring physics and velocity tracking
- Controls/Notch shape, equalizer, weather, analog clock
- Interop/Win32 and Core Audio: window, captures, full screen
- Services/Music, weather, currencies, lyrics, settings, languages
- Views/Island, carousel pages, settings and tray
Privacy and security
Trustworthy from source code to download.
An app that’s always on screen has to earn trust. Zenit does it through transparency and verification.
- No accounts, keys or telemetry.
- Music is read locally from Windows, not through each service’s web API.
- The equalizer only reads the volume level: it never records audio.
- No admin rights and no installed services.
- HTTPS-only connections, and only when you enable the matching page.
Services it uses (only if you enable them)
| Weather and cities | Open-Meteo |
|---|---|
| Your location name | BigDataCloud · ipapi.co |
| Currencies | currency-api |
| Lyrics | LRCLIB |
| Updates | GitHub Releases |
Verifiable releases
Built in public
Every version is built on GitHub Actions from the repository’s code, with reproducible builds.
Signed provenance
Each file carries a Sigstore-signed attestation proving where it came from and that nobody tampered with it.
Safe updater
It tells you when a new version is out and checks its SHA-256 before installing it.
Continuous analysis
CodeQL, OpenSSF Scorecard and Dependabot, with CI actions pinned by commit.
> gh attestation verify .\Zenit-1.1.7-win-x64.zip --repo Dysast3r/zenitVideo
Zenit in 15 seconds.
Open source
Built to grow with its community.
Easy to install
Portable zips for x64 and ARM64 that don’t require installing .NET, and coming soon to winget with a single command.
Translatable
It follows the Windows language. Translations happen on Crowdin or through a pull request.
No-code widgets
Anyone can create a widget with a JSON file: which API to call and which values to show. It can’t run code.
A living project
A public roadmap, issue templates, a contributing guide and good first issues to start helping.
{
"name": "Bitcoin",
"icon": "₿",
"accent": "#F7931A",
"url": "https://api.coinbase.com/v2/prices/BTC-USD/spot",
"refreshMinutes": 5,
"fields": [
{ "label": "BTC en USD", "path": "data.amount",
"format": "N0", "prefix": "$" }
]
}What’s next
- MSIX package and Microsoft Store, with Windows notifications in the island
- Code signing for the executable
- Frequency-band audio visualizer (FFT)
- Glass, neon, minimal and light themes
Got a product idea?
Zenit shows how I work: from idea to launch, caring about design, performance and security. Tell me what you want to build.
More projects
Independent project, not affiliated with Apple, Spotify, TIDAL or Google. "Dynamic Island" and "iPhone" are trademarks of Apple Inc.; "Spotify" of Spotify AB; "TIDAL" of TIDAL Music AS; "YouTube Music" of Google LLC.