Show HN: SpinWin – A macOS menu bar app to visually rotate or spin any window

Show HN: SpinWin – A macOS menu bar app to visually rotate or spin any window(github.com)

18 points by dbm5 8 hours ago | 5 comments

SpinWin is an open source menu bar app to visually rotate any individual window. You can rotate / spin as many as you want one by one.

I was scrolling reels when one came on where the content creator suggested "turning the phone upside down" for a portion. I was sitting at my mac, and decided to see if I could find something that did this. To my surprise, nothing exists, so I decided to build it.

Turns out macOS doesn't provide any public API to do anything like this, so I wound up using the Accessibility API to move the target window offscreen, where it keeps rendering. Then we capture it's contents with ScreenCaptureKit, and display that on a transparent, borderless overlay window which has a CALayer to rotate it.

It's written in Swift, open source, MIT license, and signed/notarized.

Have fun - would love to hear your comments.

gwynforthewyn 1 hour ago |

This reminds me of when wobbly windows were the big thing in linux. It was good plain fun back then, it seems fun again with this.

Drawing apps do regularly allow for canvas rotation, so I’m sure this’ll turn out to be useful for some class of application that I’m not considering.

itomato 1 hour ago | |

Oh, like Sun's Project Looking Glass. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXv8VlpoK_g

loumf 1 hour ago | |

I think it’s apps that don’t implement the JPEG orientation tag correctly.

mortenjorck 1 hour ago |

I’ve been building a window manger for macOS that involves hiding windows offscreen, but I’ve found AccessibilityKit clamps position writes at the screen edge, so I’ve had to settle for allowing a 1px-wide sliver (plus shadow) in the corner. Is that what you’re doing too, or did you find an alternative?

lagrange77 1 hour ago |

Very handy.