Make Your Active Foreground Window Obvious on MacOS Tahoe with Alan
One of the complaints about the new Liquid Glass interface on the Mac is that with such a reduction in contrast, it is increasingly challenging to quickly determine which of your app windows is active in the foreground. Developer Tyler Hall was annoyed enough by this with Tahoe that he created a simple app to draw an obvious border around the active window, called Alan*, and it’s available free.
The effect of the Alan app is not particularly attractive, but, it is effective – it makes it very obvious what the active foreground window is, something that has gotten increasingly difficult in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. In this way, Alan is sort of like an accessibility app for people who want to be able to quickly determine what window is the active window on a Mac.
You can customize the border width, and you can customize the border color for both light and dark mode. The border is a perfect square/rectangle, so it doesn’t wrap around the giant curves of the new interface in Tahoe. The Alan tool is basically the opposite of modern Apple design philosophy, putting function over form.
The developer Tyler Hall explains Alan as follows:
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”.
In Alan’s preferences, you can choose a preferred border width and colors for both light and dark mode.
You will need to grant Alan some permissions for accessibility, and then you can make your customizations. For dark mode I went with a 1 pixel white border around the active window, and while it doesn’t look like it’s going to win any design award, it does make it obvious what window is active and in the foreground.
* Presumably the Alan app is named after Alan Dye, the lead user interface designer at Apple who created the low-contrast Liquid Glass interface months ago, dumped it onto the user, and now just left Apple to work on design over at Meta (aka Facebook). While Liquid Glass looks pretty good on iPhone, it does not look so great on the Mac (plus accessibility is broken), and most users feel it is yet another downgrade to the once elegant interface of MacOS, though in fairness that’s not entirely Alan Dye’s fault. If we’re being honest, the Mac interface has been getting uglier and more abrasive since all the way back when Jony Ive took over User Interface design at Apple, and the ultra bright bleached neon look of Yosemite interface debuted (along with even more garish iOS 7), not long after Tim Cook fired Scott Forstall in 2012 for “being an obstacle to collaboration” or something (in retrospect, I think that meant pushing back against bad UI/UX ideas), and aside from the recently passed Steve Jobs, Forstall was then the lead proponent of skeuomorphic (ie; obvious and recognizable) design at Apple. But anyway I digress. Yeah? Well, you know, that’s just like uh, your opinion, man. And this is mine as a lifelong Apple user. Let’s hope the Mac interface gets some much needed love and repair, but in the meantime you might find an app like Alan to make using your Mac interface a little easier.
