MacFold
A menu bar app that folds the Mac's screen shut as you close the lid and unfolds it when you open it, like a foldable phone - five styles, from an iPhone Duo tilt to liquid glass and a 3D book fold.
- Type
- Personal Project · macOS / Graphics
- Year
- 2026–now
- Role
- Sole developer - sensor, rendering and app.
Follows the real hinge angle from the lid sensor frame by frame, so the fold moves with your hand - and a watchdog makes sure a black overlay can never get stuck on screen.
- Driven by the real lid angle
- Five fold styles, incl. liquid glass
- Unfolds with a spring on wake
The problem
Closing a laptop is a dead moment - the screen just cuts to black. Foldable phones showed that the fold itself can feel good.
Make the lid itself the controller: the screen folds exactly as far as the lid is closed, and springs open on wake.
What I did
- Read the hinge angle straight from the Mac's lid sensor over IOKit HID and mapped it to each style's start and end angle.
- Rendered the styles with Core Animation and Core Image - a perspective-projected sheet with depth blur, a barrel-lens warp, layered liquid glass and 3D hinges.
- Captured the real screen underneath with ScreenCaptureKit, with a wallpaper fallback, and built a state machine for lid, sleep, wake and unlock.
Outcome
A working menu bar app with five fold styles that track the lid live, plus previews and an offscreen render mode for frames.
Stack
- Swift
- AppKit
- Core Animation
- Core Image
- Metal
- ScreenCaptureKit
- IOKit