Stay Focused While Reading on Your Mac with Overlays!

When you first learned how to read, your mom or teacher likely had you hold your finger under each line as you were reading. It helped you focus on the word and sentence you were currently reading, without being distracted by all the other letters on the page. But then, as reading went digital, you can’t realistically keep a finger under your text when you’re reading on your Mac (and even on a tablet or smartphone, you’ll end up tapping something you didn’t mean to if your finger actually rests on the glass—and you’ll go insane holding your finger in the air forever).

Writing app developers solved this several years ago with single-sentence focus mode. Apps like iA Writer (now Writer Pro) and Byword let you focus on just one sentence in its focus mode, fading the other sentences to a lighter color and leaving only the sentence you’re currently writing in the full dark font. Ulysses III added an option to highlight the current line to help you focus. But when reading, in a dedicated reading app or your browser, the only way to keep your focus on the line you’re reading is by dragging your curser under the text, or obsessively selecting text while you’re reading (something I’m apt to do).

Overlays!, a new Mac app from Albelardo Gonzalez—the developer who made the OpenDyslexic typeface to help those Dyslexia have an easier time reading—is an app to solve the focus problem in any Mac app. It gives you a floating see-through bar that’s tied to your mouse cursor to highlight or hold under any text on your Mac. You can pick the color, size, and level of transparency, and turn it on or off from your menubar.

And then, whenever you’ve got any text you need to focus on, you can just turn on Overlays! and get a little bar that’ll help you keep your reading position. It’s the digital equilivent of the old finger-under-text trick, and it works great.

If you’re always randomly selecting text while you’re reading online, or worse are always losing your place and getting distracted, Overlays! is a little app that just might simplify on-screen reading for you. Plus, it’ll help support the development of the OpenDyslexic typeface, which is a nice little extra.

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