Don’t Touch is a tiny macOS app for the “I’m at a café and need the bathroom” problem.
Click Arm and walk off. Your screen turns into a calm, slowly drifting aurora that looks like a screensaver. If anyone touches, moves, closes or unplugs the laptop, it turns red, forces the volume to 100 %, plays a siren and talks back — a fresh cheeky line every three seconds (“Why you push me?”, “This is MY spot.”, “HELP! I’m being kidnapped!”, “Somebody call the barista!”) — until you type your 4-digit PIN. Then it fades back to exactly where you were.
What sets it off
- Any keyboard, trackpad or mouse input (a 3-second PIN countdown first, so you can disarm — any other key means it wasn’t you, and it screams right away)
- Lid closed or opened, power adapter unplugged or plugged in
- Lid angle changed (Macs with a lid-angle sensor)
- Sleep / wake
- The camera seeing the laptop itself move — optional, and built to ignore people walking behind you
While armed the Mac won’t idle-sleep, the menu bar, Dock and cursor are hidden, ⌘-Tab and ⌘Q are blocked, and every keystroke goes to the invisible PIN entry.
It’s not anti-theft software and it won’t stop a determined thief. It’s a laptop alarm: it makes grabbing your MacBook the loudest, most embarrassing thing anyone has done in that café today — which, for a four-minute bathroom break, is exactly the right tool.
A small native Swift app, notarized by Apple, no installer. Requires macOS 13 Ventura or newer, Apple silicon and Intel. Nothing is recorded or stored.