macOS menu bar utility

Dim what’s static. 
Clear when it’s not.

Umbra casts a steady, adjustable shadow over your menu bar and Dock — the two things on screen that never change, and the two most likely to burn into an OLED panel. Move your cursor near either one and the shadow lifts, instantly.

Download for Mac See how it works

Umbra is a Mac app — open this page on your Mac to install.

macOS 14+ (Sonoma, Sequoia, Tahoe) Universal Free & open source
Live preview — dims at rest, clears near your cursor
Why it dims, not brightens

Subtracting light is the only way to slow it down.

OLED burn-in is differential sub-pixel aging — roughly proportional to how much extra light a pixel emits over time. A compositing overlay can only slow that down by subtracting luminance from static regions; adding light would make aging worse. So Umbra draws a steady, dark scrim — never lighter than the background, never blue, the fastest-aging channel.

No animation, on purpose — moving the dark layer can’t relocate the bright content beneath it, so a consistent dim lowers average luminance the most.
Without Umbra
With Umbra 22%
What it does

One idea, done quietly.

No control panel. No dashboard. Umbra watches your cursor and shades two strips of screen — nothing else.

Menu Bar & Dock, together

Two transparent, click-through overlays sit above your status items and Dock, below dropdown menus — native menus and Control Center stay fully clickable.

Window level 26 · click-through

One slider, real range

A single 0–50% Dimming slider sets the scrim depth, with a live caption that tells you what each level actually suits.

Default 22% · Noticeable

Runs quietly, forever

Pure background agent — no Dock icon, no Cmd-Tab entry, ever. Updates itself in place via Sparkle, so it just keeps working.

LSUIElement · Sparkle auto-update
The dimming slider

You set the depth.
Try it — this one’s real.

Drag it. The preview strip and the range below both follow, live — the same 0–50% control that sits in Umbra’s own menu bar popover.

22%Noticeable — regular WOLED / QD-OLED prone to retention
Barely there ~0–8%
Tandem OLED, low-risk panels
Light ~8–20%
Most OLED displays, everyday use
Noticeable ~20–35%, default 22%
Regular WOLED / QD-OLED prone to retention
Heavy ~35–50%
High-risk static UIs — clearly darker
An honest note

The effect is real.
The magnitude is modest.

On a Tandem OLED (dual emission layer, e.g. the LG 39GX950B) the panel already halves per-layer stress, so the benefit there is small. It matters more on regular single-layer WOLED / QD-OLED. The biggest wins are still native anyway: dark-mode menu bar, auto-hiding Dock, lower panel brightness, and your display’s own pixel-shift. Treat Umbra as a modest dimming aid — not guaranteed burn-in “protection.”

A shadow you’ll forget is there.

Free. Lives in your menu bar. Clears the moment you need it to.

Download for Mac
macOS 14+ (Sonoma, Sequoia, Tahoe) Universal binary Open source