MakeItHome aims to provide tools for making the user feel like his own home with his Mac. The first objective of the app is to allow him to break the limitation of his screen for accessing hidden zones and features. Due to the limitations of sandboxes apps for the moment this technology is limited to providing fast access to the most used applications by the user, allowing him to face a lot of running tasks but focusing on the most recent uses.
How works
To activate the feature is necessary screen recording. In fact, for creating the illusion of screen movement, is necessary to record the screen below the MakeItHome window (that during the use is fullscreen) that redraws the content on a SceneKit scene using Metal.
Screen recording is also used for capturing the previews of the windows. Every frame captured is saved to RAM and it’s not saved on disk nor sent through the internet.
Then, we are ready to use the application once given screen recording permissions. The “secret zones” are actionable on the lateral sides of the screen or at the bottom. Currently, the top is excluded because of the not still mature mouse slowing function, which could bring the user to activate mistakenly the feature. This function is already activable for the dock-side in the menu bar panel. You can through the menu panel disable the feature for the side where the dock is present.
For breaking the screen bounds you have to accelerate the cursor through one of the actionable sides. Now, you should see all the used applications since the opening of MakeItHome. If you disable “Require acceleration” in the settings you don’t have to accelerate for activating the feature, but you have to move the cursor rapidly.
Have a great experience!