Stir: Why I Built a Wake-Up Greeting App for Mac
I made Stir because coding all day left me emotionally empty, and my Mac had nothing to say about it.
The Idea Behind It
There are gorgeous screensavers. There are beautiful lock screens. But after you log in - nothing. The first second your Mac is actually yours again, nobody does anything with that moment. It's just a desktop, then Slack, then email.
I kept thinking about the movie Her. Not the AI assistant part. Just the greeting. The way the system acknowledges that you showed up. That warmth. I wanted my Mac to do something like that. Not answer questions or organize my schedule. Just say hello.
Stir intercepts the moment your Mac wakes from sleep and fills it with a brief cinematic overlay. A line of text, a visual theme, a few seconds of presence. Then it fades away and you get to work.
The name means two things: to wake from sleep, and to move something inside you. Your Mac stirs. You stir.
Cinematic Overlays
Stir has two overlay modes. Echo takes over your full screen - dark, typographic, minimal. The greeting fills your display like a movie title card. Presence is a compact bubble floating over your desktop, subtle and quick.
Both auto-dismiss after a configurable duration (1-8 seconds). You never close anything. The greeting appears, you read it, it leaves.
I personally prefer Echo. There's something about a full-screen "Good morning." that resets your headspace before the noise starts.
19 Themes, One Mood Each
Each theme is built around a single feeling. Her is warm pink with soft typography - the one that started the whole idea. Terminal is green on black: "system resumed. welcome back." Paper is quiet and analog. Nocturne is dark and still.
7 themes are free. 12 unlock with a one-time Pro purchase. No subscriptions.
Connect an AI provider and get a fresh, unique greeting every wake-up. Customize the system prompt to set the tone - motivational, poetic, funny, professional. Or skip AI entirely and write your own presets for morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Stir picks the right one by time of day, no internet required.
Why Just a Greeting
Stir started from Her's emotional tone, but it's not trying to be an OS. Her was a full relationship with an AI. Stir is one moment - the first second after wake-up - and it stays there.
It doesn't show your calendar. It doesn't list your todos. It doesn't track your habits. It holds that space between sleep and work, says something warm, and steps aside. A greeting that tries to be useful stops being a greeting.
Quiet Hours suppress overlays during hours you set (default: 22:00-07:00), because nobody needs a cinematic moment at 2 AM. Wake History logs every greeting with timestamps and streak tracking. Everything stays local on your Mac.
The whole app lives in your menu bar. No Dock icon, no clutter. Native SwiftUI, zero background drain when idle.
What's Next
More themes, more animation styles. Stir is a solo project and I ship when things are ready. No roadmap promises, no timeline pressure.
Try It Out
Open your MacBook tomorrow morning and see what it feels like when your Mac actually greets you. The free tier is fully usable with 7 themes, greeting presets, Quiet Hours, and 7 days of wake history.
Download Stir free on the Mac App Store →
Stir is a native macOS menu bar app that turns every wake-up into a cinematic greeting. Available for macOS 13.0+.