Alan and Aaron
Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.
I wish it did not feel understandable for there to be an app that draws a big border around the currently active window. That should be something made sufficiently obvious by the system.
Back in the System 7 days, Apple itself was working on a new design featuring thicker window borders. Users liked the forthcoming design so much that they installed the Aaron system extension to get it early. System 8 was codenamed Copland, after composer Aaron Copland. “Alan” is presumably a reference to departing Apple design VP Alan Dye.
Previously:
Update (2025-12-09): John Gruber (Mastodon):
It’s worth following Hall’s “the contrast between windows” link, which points to his own post from five years ago lamenting the decline in contrast between active and inactive windows in MacOS.
[…]
Jobs even prepared a slide, highlighting “Prominent active window” as a noteworthy new feature. In 2007, the increase of visual prominence for the active window, going from 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard, drew applause from the audience. But the level of visual prominence indicating active/inactive windows was much higher in 10.4 Tiger than in any version of MacOS in the last decade under Alan Dye’s leadership.
Previously:
Update (2025-12-12): Pierre Igot:
In order to make up for macOS’s shortcomings, I now have not one, but TWO apps that make the foreground window stand out more:
1) Tinkle, which plays a very simple animation inside the window when it comes to the foreground:
and
2) Alan, which puts a very simple frame around the foreground window:
https://tyler.io/2025/11/26/alan/
It’s extremely sad that these are required, and I wish they both came with more elegant/less basic options, but here we are.
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I've been accidentally typing into the wrong window a lot since I installed Tahoe. I think it's a combination of things: apps that steal focus, extremely buggy task switching in Tahoe, and Tahoe's absolutely atrocious design.
If stealing a Linux feature fixes this, then I'm all for it.
I get it, it’s a joke at Alan Dye’s well-deserved expense, but this is a terrible app. Maybe Liquid Glass makes it too hard to see which window is active, but I don’t want an ugly giant red outline. And the video demo shows it to be laggy as hell.
You can change the border color and size. Similar apps are also laggy, so I'm going to guess that this is due to Apple's accessibility APIs rather than anything the app can control.
I wish people would learn the difference between "this is terrible" and "this isn't for me." I'm running this app 100% of the time now, and I love it.
I recently did a six-version OS jump from Mojave to Sequoia, so the current interface design was a change for me. HazeOver, which I learned of from Michael's Black Friday listing, has worked flawlessly and matches my preference for providing subtle-but-explicit visual distinctiveness among active and inactive windows.
There's an update to Alan that fixes a bunch of issues with how the front window was detected and measured:
https://github.com/tylerhall/Alan/releases/tag/v1.0.1
It's now working perfectly on my Mac.
