The UI extender for macOS

MakeItHome extends your Mac beyond the physical edges of the screen. Push the cursor past a screen border and you enter the overscreen: a virtual area surrounding your desktop where you can switch between apps with live window previews, pin your favorite apps, and access a full zone of widgets — without ever touching the Dock or Cmd-Tab.

Current release: 2.1.0 — available on the Mac App Store

Features

• Overscreen app switching — cross a screen edge to reveal the running apps with live, real-time window previews. Click a preview to jump straight to that window.
• App locking — pin an app to a screen edge so it is always one flick away, on every Space.
• The Widgets Zone — the top edge hosts a dedicated widgets area where you choose which built-in widgets appear:
  • Notes and Tasks — quick notes and to-do lists, always within reach.
  • Calendar — browse a clear month view, expand busy weeks, and open a daily agenda for all-day and timed events.
  • Clipboard history — capture text, rich text, images, and files, then paste them back later.
  • My Widgets — add your own custom web widgets.
• Fast web search — start a web search directly from the top zone, with full-page results in an instant overlay.
• App Extension API — third-party apps can extend their preview in the overscreen with their own interactive area (see below).
• Localization — the interface is translated into multiple languages.
• Multi-display aware — works with your monitors' arrangement.

A note on privacy

MakeItHome uses the Screen Recording permission to create its magic: the live previews of your windows. The captured images are processed entirely on your Mac — they are never saved to disk nor sent over the internet.

What's new in 2.1.0

• Choose which built-in widgets — Clipboard, Notes, Tasks, and Calendar — appear in the Widgets Zone.
• Use the redesigned Calendar with a clearer month layout, expandable week rows, a dedicated daily agenda, and improved handling of all-day and timed events.
• Rely on a more robust Clipboard history with richer text support, smoother updates, bounded image previews, and a notch-aware layout.
• Enjoy smoother live previews and improved responsiveness while MakeItHome is active or idle.
• Benefit from refined widget visuals, better overlay contrast, and general stability and memory-use improvements.

How to

How to lock an app	The Widgets Zone
Fast web search	Notes and Tasks
The Calendar	My Widgets

The App Extension

An application can extend its icon in the window-switching area. When an app exposes an extension area, an aurora borealis glows at the base of its preview: "break" the screen boundary further on the aurora's side and you access a doubled overscreen with a WebView, where the application is free to render whatever it wants.

For example, a browser can offer rapid tab switching with web page previews, or a music player can display the song queue and let you change tracks instantly. Unlike the Widgets Zone, the App Extension imposes no design structure: the focus is entirely on the API and the communication protocol between MakeItHome and the app.

A preview of the App Extension area with MakeItHome Web for Safari.

The App Extension API is implemented in the current release, and a demo app is already available: MakeItHome-AppExtension-Demo. A full tutorial and API documentation are on the way.

Project status

Version 2.1.0 builds on the "MakeItHome 2.0" foundation with a focus on configurable widgets, a more capable Calendar and Clipboard, and runtime stability:

• ✅ Widgets Zone in the top bar
• ✅ Configurable built-in widgets
• ✅ Calendar month view and daily agenda
• ✅ Rich-text and image-aware Clipboard history
• ✅ App Extension API, with a working demo app
• ✅ Browser extension groundwork (MakeItHome Web)
• ✅ Interface localization
• 🚧 Widgets from external apps
• 🚧 App Extension tutorial and API documentation
• 🚧 Browser extensions for more browsers

Development branches are named after the version in progress. The 2.1.0 source is available on the 2.1.0 branch and under the release-2.1.0 tag.

Looking for testers! New features have a talent for shipping with a bug nobody noticed. If you'd like to help make releases more stable, get in touch (contacts below).

Development

• MakeItHome requires macOS 12.3 or later and Xcode with the macOS SDK.
• Open MakeItHome.xcodeproj in Xcode and run the MakeItHome scheme.
• The app requires the Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions to function.
• Run ./Tests/run.sh for the focused preview-flow, clipboard-bound, and preview-title regression tests.
• Debug-only runtime and stress harnesses are documented in MakeItHome/StressTests/README.md.
• The top Widgets Zone web assets live in MakeItHome/Resources/assets/; its Swift controller is MakeItHome/Views/Overscreen/WidgetZoneView.swift.
• The browser extension sources are in MakeItHome/MakeItHome Web Extension/.

Heads-up on GitHub's security advisories: they are all related to the Angular project used for the Notes and Tasks widgets and are inconsistent issues in practice. The Swift code advisories are the ones worth checking.

Code quality dashboard: SonarCloud

Articles

• MacWorld: Why breaking your Mac's screen is a good idea

Credits

Riccardo Cecchini <rcecchini.ds@gmail.com> cekkr