Subscribe
Sign in
YellowDot — Hide the microphone orange dot in macOS Monterey
This is a free macOS app that hides the macOS recording indicator (a.k.a. the orange dot) from the corner of your screen, so you can project your screen without annoyances.
10
Replies
Best
The most unnecessary product of the year. Tech companies make such things to educate and respect our privacy which might feel little annoying but it's good for us.
@mehtavatsal I would say that it depends a lot on what you use the device for.
For example, when projecting live visuals from your Mac, you might want to make the screen background black (or the same colour as the wall) to give the impression of floating effects. The orange dot in the corner breaks that illusion.
Imagine going to a performance to see something like this and there's an always visible huge orange dot in the top right corner: https://youtu.be/l1ZlwbHuhrU?t=48
(huge because projecting the screen to a big wall makes everything big)
Another example is using an app that has to constantly use the mic, (e.g. Backtrack, Boom3D, Logic Pro etc.). In that case, the orange dot becomes useless as it's always visible, and some people might be particularly sensitive to these annoyances.
@alin23 I understand your concern as there are always two sides to every coin. I suggest you can add an option to ignore selected apps in which the dot disappear or disappears for a certain time and is visible after that period or else it will defeat the whole purpose of this indicator.
@mehtavatsal Unfortunately that's not possible from the application side. YellowDot only sees that there's a dot visible but not why it's visible.
If you for example launch both Backtrack and Zoom and you want to ignore Backtrack but still have Zoom show the dot, there's no info available to do that filtering.
Hopefully Apple will add that as a native option in the future.
Wish there was a way to hide the Control Center icon as well but understand that's not possible without disabling SIP. Thanks so much for giving choice back to users!
@marfapr Hi Konstantin! The app works for what it's advertised.
YellowDot only hides the corner dot as exemplified here: 
The Control Panel icon dot can't be hidden as it's embedded inside the icon. Hiding the corner dot is what's most needed because that dot doesn't go away when the menubar is not visible.
The Control Panel icon dot can't be hidden as it's embedded inside the icon. Hiding the corner dot is what's most needed because that dot doesn't go away when the menubar is not visible.
Clop