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SpinWin

A macOS menu bar app to visually rotate or spin any window

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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.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.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.It's written in Swift, open source, MIT license, and signed/notarized.Have fun - would love to hear your comments.

HN · launched Jul 25, 2026 · 37 upvotes (top 19%) · 0 views

Niche: macos menu bar utilities · 312 launches, 20 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • Prosumer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 312 launches in macos menu bar utilities →

Could you build this?

Partial Rotating external OS windows requires deep, undocumented macOS Accessibility and CoreGraphics private window server APIs that standard vibe coding struggles to debug.

What it would actually take: Building this requires a Swift macOS menu bar app interfacing with undocumented SkyLight or private CoreGraphics APIs (CGSSetWindowTransform / CGSWindowID) along with ScreenCaptureKit and Accessibility permissions. These private APIs frequently crash, break across macOS releases, and lack public documentation or clear LLM training representations.

Discussion

16 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: BetterDisplay (uses CGVirtualDisplay private APIs), wayfire (window manager with similar functionality), Sun's Project Looking Glass

Concerns raised: AccessibilityKit clamps position writes at screen edge, Display disconnect or resolution change causes parked windows to pop back into view, Private APIs may be too risky for commercial products, Not available on macOS, Difficulty getting keyboard input and mouse clicks to work with virtual displays

Feature requests: Completely isolated dummy display outside desktop geometry, Method to prevent windows from becoming visible on display changes, Support for keyboard and mouse input on hidden windows

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 583 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #145 of 584 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 257 days after the earliest competitor.

  • Sash · hn · 2026-04-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.52
  • StableBar · ph · 2026-11-11 · 84 upvotes · similarity 0.52
  • TileMyMac · ph · 2026-10-19 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
  • Angler · ph · 2026-09-22 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • SlideScroll · ph · 2026-10-24 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • Chain Your Mac · ph · 2026-09-20 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • Spino · ph · 2026-10-25 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.49
  • ipad-vertical · github · 2026-10-12 · 25 upvotes · similarity 0.48

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.