Tinkle Highlights Your Active Window on macOS
One of the biggest complaints about the new Liquid Glass design in macOS Tahoe is that it’s difficult to separate windows, and that there’s very little difference between the active window and the back window which can be a challenge for most users to quickly separate them. Tinkle tries to help you quickly determine which window is active by adding a small flashing effect that goes around the perimeter of the active window whenever the window’s focus changes. It’s simple, functional, and an easy tweak for accessibility, especially for Tahoe users.
Whether you click, tab, or keyboard shortcut when you enter windows and applications, Tinkle can make it easy to determine what the focus is on the fly, by temporarily highlighting the currently active window.
Tinkle is a free download, runs on macOS Tahoe (technically compatible with macOS Ventura and later), and is open source:
Tinkle automatically switches to using a dark gray/black animation when you switch to an active window, but the app allows you to change the color of the visual animation, and it will automatically launch on auto-login. Of course you can make changes to any of those if you like. For Tinkle to work properly, you’ll need to grant it permissions within System Settings.
The animation is short, it stays for about half a second near the front window, as you can see in the image below:
Also, the gray/black border and gradient are temporary, only displayed when you switch to the active window.
You may already be familiar with another macOS Tahoe tool that aims to make the UI easier to use, the Alan app, which draws a continuous border on the active window in the color of your choice. Tinkle is different though in that it’s a short animation inside the window, rather than constantly dragging around it, and you may also find Tinkle + Alan a useful combination if you find the Liquid Glass look a challenging user experience, as the combination offers many visual features to help you switch between apps and windows.
You’ll also want to make sure you’re updating macOS Tahoe to 26.3 or later, because Apple fixed Reduce Clarity in the end after letting it stay broken for several releases, meaning you can now successfully use a few tricks to reduce the Liquid Glass look in Tahoe as well, and use that tweak to stop overlapping text and other similar UI/UX issues.
Tinkle is a Mac tool, which is where Liquid Glass is sloppy too, but if you’re on the iPhone and iPad side of things you can use the ‘Show Borders’ setting to make iOS and iPadOS easier to navigate and use visually too.
Liquid Glass is probably here to stay, and it’s definitely a permanent part of the macOS Tahoe release, so use what you need and make the best of it.
What do you think of Tinkle and similar apps for Mac? Do you enjoy and appreciate tools like these, or do you wish the macOS interface was easier to distinguish, use, and more transparent by default? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.
