Tinkle Highlights Your Active Window on MacOS
One of the major complaints of the new Liquid Glass design on macOS Tahoe is that it’s difficult to differentiate windows, and that there is so little contrast between the active window and a background window that it can be challenging for many users to tell them apart quickly. Tinkle attempts to help you immediately determine which window is active by adding a little glowing visual effect around the perimeter of the active window whenever the window focus changes. It’s simple, effective, and a handy accessibility tweak, particularly for Tahoe users.
Whether you click, tab, or keyboard shortcut your way through windows and apps, Tinkle can make it easy to determine what is in focus right away, by momentarily highlighting the currently active window.
Tinkle is a free download, works on macOS Tahoe (technically it’s compatible with macOS Ventura and later), and is open source:
Tinkle defaults to using a dark grey/black animation when you switch to an active window, but the app lets you change the color of the visual animation, and will auto-launch on login by default. Of course you can make adjustments to either of those if desired. For Tinkle to operate properly, you will need to grant it permissions within System Settings too.
The animation is brief, lasting maybe a half second around the foreground window, as you can see in the screenshot below:
Again, the dark grey/black border and gradient is temporary, only shown when you switch to an active window.
You might already be familiar with another tool for macOS Tahoe that aims to make the UI easier to use, the Alan app, which draws a constant border around the active window with a color of your choice. Tinkle is different though because it’s a brief animation inside the window, rather than constantly drawn around it, and you might even find that Tinkle + Alan is a helpful combination if you’re finding the Liquid Glass look to be a challenging user experience, since the combination gives multiple obvious visual cues to help you switch between apps and windows.
You’ll also want to make sure that you update macOS Tahoe to 26.3 or later, because Apple fixed Reduce Transparency finally after letting it sit broken for several releases, which means you can now effectively use a few tricks to reduce the Liquid Glass look on Tahoe again, and use that toggle to stop overlapping text and other similar legibility and UI/UX issues.
Tinkle is a Mac tool, which is where Liquid Glass is the most sloppy too, but if you’re on the iPhone and iPad side of things you can use a ‘Show Borders’ setting to make iOS and iPadOS easier to navigate and use visually too.
Liquid Glass is almost certainly here to stay, and it’s certainly forever a part of the macOS Tahoe release, so use what you need to and make the best of it.
What do you think of Tinkle and apps like this for the Mac? Do you enjoy and appreciate tools like this, or do you wish the MacOS interface was easier to differentiate, use, and more obvious by default? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.
