r/macosprogramming

If you hand your laptop to someone for a few minutes, they can still open Messages, Photos, Notes, Mail, WhatsApp, browsers, password managers, and other personal apps. I wanted a way to protect specific applications without constantly locking my entire Mac.

I looked around for solutions, but most were outdated, paid, abandoned, or didn't feel native to macOS.

So I built FaceGate.

FaceGate is a native macOS app that lets you lock individual applications and unlock them using Face Unlock, Touch ID, or a password.

A few things I focused on from day one:

• Everything runs locally on your Mac
• No cloud processing
• No accounts
• No telemetry
• No subscriptions
• Fully open source

Features:

• Face Unlock powered entirely on-device using Apple's Neural Engine - little impact on cpu and gpu resources.
• Fast authentication with very low memory and CPU usage
• Liveness detection to prevent photo and video spoofing attacks
• Touch ID and password fallback
• Per-app unlock timers
• Automatic re-lock on sleep, wake, or screen lock
• Custom schedules for automatic lock/unlock periods
• Tamper protection that prevents FaceGate from being quit, disabled, or uninstalled without authentication
• Runs quietly from the menu bar with minimal system impact.

The entire project is written in Swift and designed specifically for macOS.

This is still actively being developed, and I'd genuinely love feedback from Mac users.

Some questions:

• Is app-level locking something you've wanted on macOS?
• Which apps would you personally lock?
• What security or privacy features would you like to see added?

Website: https://facegate-applocker.vercel.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/dweep-desai/FaceGate-Mac

If you think I did a good job, please feel free to leave a star on my github repo - means a lot to me.

Feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and contributions are all welcome. I'd love to hear what you think.

Link - https://github.com/rampatra/TourKit

Hello! I'm Nico. Founder of and building Keylight, a licensing layer for macOS apps.

The idea came from a simple frustration: if you want to sell a macOS app outside the App Store, licensing quickly becomes messy.

You either use a full payment platform where license keys are just an extra feature, or you build your own system with keys, activations, renewals, offline access, analytics, customer portals, etc.

Keylight is trying to be the focused middle layer:

• Issue and manage license keys
• Support subscriptions, renewals, upgrades, and onetime purchases
• Add offline license checks for macOS apps
• See useful analytics around activations and usage
• Work with providers like Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Gumroad, etc
• Use a Swift SDK to integrate into your app

The goal is not to replace every payment provider.

It’s to give devs and small teams a proper licensing system without taking a big cut or forcing them into one specific checkout stack.

I’d love feedback from SaaS builders here:

Would you prefer a licensing tool to be tied directly to payments, or kept separate as its own layer?

And if you sell downloadable software, what’s the most annoying part of licensing for you right now?

Site: keylight.dev