I kept falling asleep to shows or YouTube on my Mac and waking up to a screen still too bright, even at the lowest setting macOS allows. There was no way to dim further, so I built Umbraa: a menu bar utility that pushes brightness well past the system floor, with warm/red tints, a fade-to-black sleep timer, and automatic sunset-to-sunrise dimming. No account, no tracking. $4, macOS 26+. For anyone who's startled awake at 3am to a screen going full blast.
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Hi, I'm Andriy, the creator of Umbraa.
I built this because of a habit I never managed to break. Most nights I fall asleep to a show or a YouTube video on my Mac. It's been going on for years and it's not a great habit, because the screen has no idea I've drifted off. The episode ends, autoplay picks something new, and I wake up at 3am to a screen still going full blast in an otherwise pitch dark room. Even macOS's lowest brightness setting isn't dim enough for that, and there's no way to push it any lower.
For a long time I just dealt with it. Squinting, half-closing the lid, or hoping my girlfriend would notice and close it for me once I'd fallen asleep. Eventually I got curious why nobody had actually fixed this. Turns out macOS controls the backlight down to a hardware floor and just stops there, there's no software layer underneath it. So I built one.
Umbraa started as a weekend project just for me. A menu bar app that did the one thing I needed: dim the screen further than macOS allows. Once that worked I kept adding small things that made me actually reach for it every night instead of it staying a one-off hack:
- A dimming slider that goes well past the system minimum, with an instant preview
- Warm and Red tints for when even dim white light is too much
- A sleep timer with adjustable fade duration
- Automatic dimming from sunset to sunrise
- Works with external displays, keyboard shortcuts, launches at login
- Most recently added a "Sleep Now" button that fades straight to black on demand
No account, no logins, no tracking, nothing collected. I just wanted the thing macOS was missing.
Would love to hear if anyone else deals with this exact problem, or any feedback on what's missing.