Show HN: SpinWin – A macOS menu bar app to visually rotate or spin any window
by dbm5 on 7/25/2026, 5:29:55 PM
SpinWin is an open source menu bar app to visually rotate any individual window. You can rotate / spin as many as you want one by one.<p>I was scrolling reels when one came on where the content creator suggested "turning the phone upside down" for a portion. I was sitting at my mac, and decided to see if I could find something that did this. To my surprise, nothing exists, so I decided to build it.<p>Turns out macOS doesn't provide any public API to do anything like this, so I wound up using the Accessibility API to move the target window offscreen, where it keeps rendering. Then we capture it's contents with ScreenCaptureKit, and display that on a transparent, borderless overlay window which has a CALayer to rotate it.<p>It's written in Swift, open source, MIT license, and signed/notarized.<p>Have fun - would love to hear your comments.
https://github.com/alokdhir/spinwin
Comments
by: gwynforthewyn
This reminds me of when wobbly windows were the big thing in linux. It was good plain fun back then, it seems fun again with this.<p>Drawing apps do regularly allow for canvas rotation, so I’m sure this’ll turn out to be useful for some class of application that I’m not considering.
7/26/2026, 12:34:20 AM
by: mortenjorck
I’ve been building a window manger for macOS that involves hiding windows offscreen, but I’ve found AccessibilityKit clamps position writes at the screen edge, so I’ve had to settle for allowing a 1px-wide sliver (plus shadow) in the corner. Is that what you’re doing too, or did you find an alternative?
7/26/2026, 12:34:00 AM
by: lagrange77
Very handy.
7/26/2026, 1:02:44 AM
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7/25/2026, 9:26:08 PM