Away Blur

Why

You get up for a minute. Your messages, your bank tab, the code you are not supposed to show anyone yet stay on the screen for whoever walks past. Locking the Mac every time is a password every time, so most of the time nobody does it.

Away Blur covers the screen instead of locking it. No password, no waiting: touch any key or move the mouse and you are back where you were.

What you get

• It notices you left. No keyboard or mouse for a minute and a half (or however long you choose) and the screen frosts.
• It doesn't blur your movie. Anything playing video or on a call is keeping the display awake, and while it does, Away Blur waits. You can sit through a film without touching anything.
• Leaving on purpose. Press ⌥⇧⌘B as you stand up and it frosts right away. You get four seconds to let go of the keys.
• Two looks. Privacy turns the screen into an unreadable dark blur in under half a second. Ambient is a soft frost that drifts in slowly, so you can still tell roughly what's there. One strength setting, 1 to 5, makes either one lighter or heavier.
• A cat keeps watch. A small pixel cat sits in the middle of the frost. Every so often it stretches, yawns, paws at the frost or pounces, and after ten minutes it lies down to sleep. Prefer a dog? Switch it for a fluffy Maltese that wags, begs and spins on the spot.
• A line for whoever glances over. Under the cat: how long you've been gone, the time, the battery.
• Your agents, at a glance. If you use Claude Code or Codex, each session gets a small dot under the cat: orange while it's working, green when it's done and waiting for you. When one finishes, the cat bristles so you notice from across the room. In the Privacy look you get the dots but not the names.

Install

1. Download Away-Blur.dmg, open it, and drag Away Blur into Applications.
2. Open it. It lives in the menu bar; there is no Dock icon.
3. Allow it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording.

Privacy

It needs Screen Recording to take one still picture of the screen at the moment you leave, so it has something to blur. That picture stays in graphics memory and is gone when the blur clears. Nothing is saved to disk and nothing is sent anywhere. The app is signed and notarized by Apple.

Build it yourself

A plain Swift package with no dependencies. You need Xcode 16 or later.

Scripts/build.sh --run

How the blur, the cat and the rest work, and why they were built that way, is in docs/NOTES.md.

Credit

The blur technique comes from mac-duo by Nino Bouchedid (MIT).