Amplitude active users on your Mac

Notch Metrics2 min read

Amplitude is built for asking hard questions. Most days you have one easy question, and loading a product analytics suite to answer it is the wrong shape of effort.

How do you watch Amplitude without opening it?

Notch Metrics puts the headline figures in the MacBook notch. Collapsed, a thin strip. Hover the camera housing and it expands over whatever you were doing. Move away and it folds back to the shape it had.

What Amplitude reports

Number What it is
Active users Anyone who did anything, de-duplicated
New users First seen in the window
Events Every event recorded, of every type

Three numbers rather than thirty, and that is the point. The notch is a few hundred pixels of glass. If you need a cohort breakdown, Amplitude is still the right place to go.

Daily buckets, with no hourly option

Amplitude's Dashboard REST API serves daily, weekly and monthly intervals. There is no hourly one, so the widgets offer none rather than manufacturing it by splitting a day into twenty-four equal pieces.

A sparkline that invents its own resolution is worse than a coarser one.

Why the bars do not add up

Active users is de-duplicated across the whole window, so one person active on three days is one user and three bars. A weekly figure is not the sum of seven daily figures.

That is Amplitude's own behaviour and it is the correct one. It is worth knowing before you check the arithmetic.

Connecting

An API key, a secret key and your project's region. Amplitude runs US and EU data centres and a key pair from one returns an error against the other, which reads like bad credentials rather than a wrong region. The connector asks, and says so when it fails. What the Amplitude connector asks for.

Both keys are encrypted on the server with a key unique to that connection, so the Mac app never holds them.

Beta, and the mark

The Amplitude connector is marked beta on its page. It connects and returns figures today. It also has no vendored brand mark, so it shows a lettermark rather than an approximated logo, which is a deliberate choice: an approximated logo looks like a bug and a lettermark looks like a decision.

Alongside everything else

Revenue from Stripe, traffic from Plausible and Google Analytics, product analytics from PostHog. Every source.

Apple silicon, macOS 14 and later. Seven days with no card, then $9 a month or $49 a year. Download Notch Metrics.

  • amplitude
  • analytics
  • mac

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Questions

How do I see Amplitude active users on my Mac?
Install Notch Metrics, connect Amplitude on the web with an API key, a secret key and your project region, and place the active users widget in the MacBook notch.
Why do the Amplitude widgets have no hourly option?
Because the Amplitude Dashboard REST API serves daily, weekly and monthly intervals and offers no hourly one. Splitting a day into twenty-four equal pieces would be inventing resolution the API never returned.
Does Notch Metrics support Amplitude EU?
Yes. The connector asks which region your project is in, because Amplitude runs US and EU data centres and a key pair from one fails against the other with an error that reads like bad credentials.
Why do Amplitude daily bars not add up to the weekly figure?
Because active users is de-duplicated across the whole window. One person active on three days is one user and three bars, so a weekly figure is smaller than the sum of seven daily ones.
Why does Amplitude show a letter instead of a logo?
Because no vendored brand mark exists for it. Notch Metrics shows a lettermark rather than approximating a logo, on the grounds that an approximated logo looks like a bug and a lettermark looks like a choice.