Ajar makes the MacBook screen behave like a pane that stays where it was put. Move the lid and the picture frosts and holds the pose it had when the movement started; hold the lid still and it catches up and sharpens over a couple of seconds. What you see tilting is the angle you actually turned the lid through.
It lives in the menu bar and draws on the built-in display. Nothing is recorded and nothing is sent anywhere.
- Open Ajar-1.0.dmg and drag Ajar onto the Applications shortcut.
- Open Ajar from Applications. macOS refuses it the first time, because the build is not notarised: right-click the app and choose Open, then confirm.
- Ajar shows a short checklist — the lid angle sensor, the built-in display, Screen Recording permission, and optionally the camera. The first three are required, and each row tells you what is missing and takes you to it.
There is no Dock icon; Ajar appears in the menu bar.
- Left-click the menu bar icon for the menu: turn the effect on or off, open Settings, run setup again, quit. When something is missing, the menu says what.
- Right-click (or Control-click) the icon to toggle the effect without opening the menu.
- The effect is on by default once setup is finished, and it remembers whichever way you leave it.
- While the effect is up it covers the whole panel — menu bar and Dock included — and your Mac stays usable underneath, clicks and all.
- Settings (⌘,) holds the camera position: how far back and how high you sit, which decides how much of the picture's height survives a tilt. Detect where I'm sitting measures it for you — about a second of the built-in camera, with a preview of the frames it is looking at, nothing recorded — and you can still drag the dot afterwards.
- Move the lid the way you normally would. Opening and closing it gently is all the effect needs.
- macOS 14 or later.
- A MacBook with the lid angle sensor: MacBook Pro 16-inch (2019), MacBook Pro 14/16-inch (2021 and later), MacBook Air M2 (2022) and later. Setup says plainly if yours does not answer.
- The built-in display in use. If it goes away — clamshell with an external monitor — the effect turns itself off and tells you so in a notification.
- Screen Recording permission, because the effect draws the screen back over itself.
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| The menu bar icon is greyed out | The effect is off. Left-click for the reason if you did not turn it off yourself. |
| "Waiting for the hinge…" | The sensor is not answering. Open and close the lid once, and try again. |
| Nothing happens when you move the lid | The built-in display has to be the screen in use, and the effect has to be on. |
| The picture stops catching up | Move the lid a little and let go: it sharpens about two seconds after the lid stops. |
| macOS asks for Screen Recording again after an update | Each build has its own identity, so the permission has to be granted again. |
| The effect turned itself off with a notification | The built-in display went away. Plug nothing in and reopen the lid; it comes back if you had it on. |
- Not notarised, which is why the first launch needs a right-click. There is no Developer ID signature behind this build.
- Version 1.0 is an experiment, not a product: no auto-update, no App Store build, and the menus and settings are still moving.
- The effect is for the built-in display only.
Ajar is source-available under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. Noncommercial use, modification, and distribution are permitted under its terms. Commercial use requires a separate written license from Ning Kuang.
Scripts/build.sh builds the app, Scripts/package-dmg.sh builds the disk image, Scripts/verify-dmg.sh checks that the image contains nothing but the app, and swift test runs the tests.