Focusly - macOS Ambience & Focus Companion

🇺🇦 · 🇷🇺 · 🇨🇳 · 🇯🇵 · 🇰🇷 · 🇹🇭 · 🇹🇷 · 🇩🇪 · 🇫🇷 · 🇮🇹 · 🇪🇸 - Europe & Asia (11)

🇺🇦 Українська
🇷🇺 Русский
🇨🇳 中文（简体）
🇯🇵 日本語
🇰🇷 한국어
🇹🇭 ภาษาไทย
🇹🇷 Türkçe
🇩🇪 Deutsch
🇫🇷 Français
🇮🇹 Italiano
🇪🇸 Español (España)

🇦🇪 · 🇹🇿 · 🇳🇬 - Africa & Middle East (3)

🇦🇪 العربية (الفصحى)
🇹🇿 Kiswahili
🇳🇬 Hausa

🇧🇷 · 🇲🇽 · 🇵🇹 · 🇺🇸 - Americas (4)

🇧🇷 Português (Brasil)
🇲🇽 Español (LatAm)
🇵🇹 Português (Portugal)
🇺🇸 English

_{Spanish ships in both 🇲🇽 LatAm and 🇪🇸 Spain variants - the Americas card highlights LatAm while Europe & Asia lists the Iberian pack.}

About Focusly

Focusly is a lightweight menu bar companion that softens the edges of every display, keeps the active window crisp, and lets you dial in ambience without touching your creative tools - perfect for people who want deep focus without living in full-screen mode.

It’s built to feel like a native macOS control - fast, glassy, localized, and respectful of your privacy.

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Privacy & Trust

Focusly is built on the principle that privacy isn’t an afterthought - it’s the architecture.

• Offline by design - zero networking code, no telemetry, no analytics SDKs.
• No screen capture - overlays rely on Accessibility metadata, never on screenshots.
• Data stays local - presets, onboarding state, and preferences live in your macOS account’s UserDefaults.
• Permission aware - decline Accessibility and the app gracefully downgrades instead of quitting.
• Transparent pipeline - every script required to audit, sign, and ship the app sits in this repo.

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Quiet Power in Your Menu Bar

Tap to preview the menu bar tricks

• Context-aware masking keeps the foreground app clear while gently blurring everything else so your brain stays in flow.
• Preset Library ships with Smart Blur, Warm, Dark, White, Paper, Moss, and Ocean looks plus per-display tint + opacity overrides.
• Per-monitor ambience lets you tune multi-display setups individually - brighten the reference monitor, dim the chat screen.
• Shift-click focus lets you flip between masking only the focused window or every window from the same app, per display, without opening Preferences.
• Dual hotkeys give you one shortcut to toggle overlays and another to cycle the masking mode, so you can keep hands on the keyboard.
• Instant control from the status bar: toggle overlays, swap presets, and edit preferences in a couple of clicks or via customizable global hotkeys.
• Guided onboarding walks first-time users through permissions, color picks, and localization so the app feels ready on launch.

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Made for Every Desk, Everywhere

Being a minimalist, productivity-first app means - at least to me as the developer, Jan - that every surface should feel intentional, and that includes shipping as much localization as humanly possible instead of treating it as a stretch goal.

• 18 languages shipping today (English, German, Spanish EU + MX, French, Italian, Portuguese EU + BR, Arabic MSA, Kiswahili, Hausa, Simplified Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Turkish) so teammates worldwide see Focusly in their native voice the moment it launches.
• Right-to-left + Latin scripts are tested against the same onboarding stories and menus, keeping cultural nuances intact.
• Locale-aware presets let each translation bundle tweak color names and descriptions without touching code.
• Community glossary lives in Focusly/Resources/Localization/*.lproj, making it easy for translators to submit improvements with context screenshots.
• Native speaker call: I need native speakers to keep shaping their languages, but please hold PRs/issues until Alpha 0.5 lands-major localization changes are planned through that release and strings are still moving.

18
_{18 / 18 launch languages locked in for Alpha}

Focusly is designed for hybrid teams spread across time zones - the app never phones home, so the experience in Nairobi or Nagoya is identical to New York.

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Upcoming Features

Alpha flight checklist

• Overlay Performance - higher refresh via smarter blur scheduling (feature-complete locally; validating on diverse GPUs before calling it done).
• Settings Refresh - enhancing the usability of the app settings window

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Try the newest Alpha Release Today

1. Mount Focusly.dmg and drag Focusly.app into /Applications.
2. Launch Focusly.app from /Applications. Signed releases (the default) open immediately - I’ll call out any build that isn’t.
3. If you intentionally grabbed an unsigned/dev build, macOS will block it: open System Settings › Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway next to Focusly, confirm, then relaunch.
4. Approve Accessibility under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility to unlock precise window tracking.
5. Tap the menu bar icon and toggle Enable Overlays.

Latest alpha DMG lives on GitHub Releases.

🛡️ Gatekeeper’s Open Anyway step only applies to unsigned/test drops. Signed releases are already notarized, so drag-copy-launch is enough.

License

Released under the MIT License - see LICENSE for details.

All currently included features will stay free forever; optional paid tiers may appear after the full release.

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Ko-Fi

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