Spine macOS
90°lid angle · clear

Close the lid.
The desktop goes with it.

Spine follows your MacBook's hinge, degree by degree. The desktop leans away as the gap narrows, loses focus, falls dark — then stands straight back up the moment you lift the lid. Nothing to learn, nothing to press.

Buy Spine $3.99 One key, three Macs, nothing to renew.

One payment, yours for good. No subscription, nothing to sign up for. See what it needs.

A Mac desktop folding

Keep scrolling — you're closing the lid. Notice the desktop never shrinks away from the edges: it keeps the screen filled and packs itself toward the far side, which is why it reads as depth instead of a picture being tilted.

Spine settings window
img/settings.pngsettings window, ~4:3
One panel for all of it: a preview that folds while you drag the angle, a switch to hand the angle back to the lid, and the three sliders — perspective, variable blur, shadow — that every style is made of.

The machinery

The hinge
Spine reads the lid angle off a sensor Apple already put in your MacBook. Whole degrees, straight from the hardware — no timers guessing at it, no accessibility permissions.
The whole screen
Not a wallpaper trick. Your live screen goes to the graphics card and comes back folded, so windows, menus and whatever video is playing all bend together.
Lid or book
Hinge it along the top edge and the desktop stays standing while the screen lies down. Or crease it down the middle, the way a foldable phone shuts.
Silk, Shade, Frost
Three ways to disappear: barely there, dimming like a room at dusk, or dissolving into fog. Each one is only where the three sliders happen to sit, so nothing stops you moving them.
Or by hand
Mac without the sensor? Take the angle yourself, with a slider or a hotkey, and the effect is identical.
The click
One dry click as the desktop settles on the way open. Nothing on the way down — the screen is already dark by then and nobody would hear it. Silence it in General.
Out of the way
No Dock icon, no window in your face, one menu bar item. Esc pauses it. Capture switches off the moment the desktop is flat again, so the battery never notices.

What it needs

System
macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.
The sensor
A MacBook that shipped with a lid angle sensor — the 16-inch Pro from 2019 onwards, and everything since. Older machines still get the effect by hand.
One permission
Screen Recording. A desktop it can't see is a desktop it can't fold, and that is the only thing it will ever ask you for.
Your screens
It works on the built-in display. Whatever you have plugged in is left exactly as it was.

Nothing leaves your Mac

No server
There isn't one. Frames are folded on your own graphics card and dropped on the spot — nothing is saved, and there is nowhere for any of it to go.
No sign-up
No account, no password, no analytics counting what you do with your afternoon. Buy it, paste the key, forget it's there.
Signed by Apple
Developer ID signature and Apple's notarisation, so it opens on a fresh Mac without the dialog that makes people close the app.

Buy it once. Fold it for good.

Fourteen days to change your mind, no explanation needed. If it doesn't feel right on your machine, you get your money back.

Buy Spine $3.99