penombra, darkness and wakefulness for the Mac, is on the way

We are building penombra, a Mac menu bar utility that does two things at once, and does them together on purpose.

A veil, not a filter

Below a certain threshold the Mac backlight goes no lower. penombra then lays a dark veil over every connected display, covering the menu bar and the notch area too. The colours stay as they are, calibration is untouched, and if the app quits the veil dies with it: safe by construction, not by promise.

And meanwhile the Mac does not fall asleep

This is the other half of the job. A preset can keep the Mac and the display awake together, so a long build reaches the end and a transfer is not interrupted because you got up from your desk. The two levers are separate, and below the battery threshold you choose wakefulness switches off on its own.

The two halves are never together

The market is split in two, on one side the apps that dim and on the other those that keep the Mac awake, and whoever uses one almost always ends up installing the other. In penombra they are the same thing, inside the same preset.

It turns on by itself when needed

A preset can start at a precise time or at your local sunset. Rules stay true as long as a condition lasts, while a certain program runs, after a few minutes in which you touch nothing, during a video call, when the laptop switches to battery. There is a penombra:// address for scripts, there are Shortcuts actions and there is the macOS Focus filter.

No special permissions

No Accessibility, no DDC, no gamma tables, no account and no analytics. Everything stays on your Mac.

Coming soon

Penombra is in development. The product page describes what the first version is planned to include, you can find it at systema360.it/prodotti/penombra.