Native macOS · for parents who work

Hand over the keyboard.
Keep your work.

One shortcut drops a transparent kid-mode cage over your Mac. Ordinary typing, clicking, and scrolling are caught before they reach your apps — and turned into calm, glowing light your little one can play with. Your real desktop stays right there, untouched.

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Your files never touched Exit is a deliberate 3-second parent gesture No account, no cloud Developer-ID signed & Apple-notarized
kiddyproof — kid mode active Live

A faithful re-creation of the Drift scene, running live in your browser — drifting fireflies, blooms on every tap, a cursor that gently gathers the light. The Mac behind it never feels a thing.

How it works

Three seconds in. One gesture out.

No setup, no profiles, no lockout screens. The protection is invisible and instant.

1

Press the shortcut

Hit ⌃⌥⌘K or click the menu-bar shield. Kid mode arms in a single beat — and only after it proves the keyboard is truly captured.

2

The cage drops

A transparent shield falls over the whole screen. Typing, clicks and scrolls are swallowed at the system level — before your apps can react.

3

Play becomes light

Your child mashes away and the screen answers in calm, glowing motion. To leave, you hold the ⌃⌥⌘ keys — or press & hold the bottom-left corner — for three seconds. Random mashing can't reproduce a deliberate three-second hold.

The scenes

Calm by design. Never overstimulating.

Each scene is tuned to soothe, not to hype — slow easing, low-contrast palettes, soft additive glow. Input adds a little life, but it's gently capped so a frantic toddler never makes it frantic. A calm scene always opens by default; the two Energetic scenes are opt-in, only on when you switch them on.

Why a cat?

A kiddy for your kiddo.

“Kiddy” has always meant two things — a small child, and a small cat. kiddyproof is built for both kinds of mischief: the curious paws and the curious fingers that find every key they shouldn't. So we gave the app a calm little cat to watch over the chaos.

  • Made for the in-between moments

    The call you can't drop, the email mid-sentence, the toddler who wants the laptop now.

  • Protective, not punishing

    No scary lock screen. Just a soft, beautiful world where ordinary typing, clicking, and scrolling can't reach your apps, files, or messages.

  • Quietly serious underneath

    The cuteness is skin-deep. Beneath it is a system-level input tap and an independent watchdog built to hand control back to you.

The serious part

Engineered like it matters. Because it does.

The blocking isn't a flimsy overlay you can click through. It's a system-level event tap, designed against every way it could fail — and built to be hardened long before it ever guards a screen.

Caught at the source

A CGEventTap swallows input on a dedicated thread — ordinary typing, clicks and scrolls never reach your apps. The overlay is purely visual.

Your screen, untouched

The cage is transparent at full brightness — nothing dimmed, moved, or closed. Kids love the familiar desktop, and you decide the moment to hand it over.

Only you can leave

Exit needs a deliberate ⌃⌥⌘ hold or a three-second bottom-left corner-hold — gestures a child won't stumble into.

An independent watchdog

A separate, tap-free process monitors a heartbeat. If anything hangs — even the app itself — it restores your control within seconds.

Good to know — exactly where the edges are

kiddyproof blocks ordinary typing, clicking, and scrolling very well. A few escapes sit below what any Mac app can intercept — we tell you exactly where the edges are, because you should never have to guess.

  • It stays quiet. Effects come with soft, sparse sound — never percussive or jarring — and a single setting mutes audio entirely if you'd rather hand over a silent screen.
  • Hardware buttons can't be caught. The power / Touch ID button works at the hardware level — a press can sleep or lock the Mac (your documents stay safe, but kid mode ends).
  • A few macOS-reserved shortcuts can slip through. Force Quit (⌘⌥⎋) and accessibility shortcuts (like VoiceOver's ⌘F5) are handled below where an app can reliably block them — a determined mash could trigger one.
  • Big trackpad swipes reach macOS directly. Three- and four-finger Mission Control and Spaces gestures come from the trackpad hardware — a flat toddler hand on the trackpad can switch Spaces or open Mission Control.
  • The lid and the lock keep their jobs. Closing the lid, or an idle auto-lock timer, still sleeps or locks the Mac like always — kiddyproof keeps the display awake while armed, but it can't (and shouldn't) override the lid.
  • Over another app's native-fullscreen video or game, the visuals step back. Input is still blocked, but the glowing cage can't paint over foreign fullscreen content — you'll see the video, not the fireflies.
  • It won't run when it can't be safe. If macOS Secure Input is active (a password field, FileVault), kiddyproof refuses to arm rather than pretend — so you're never falsely reassured.

Let them play.
Get back to work.

Free for 7 days, then a one-time license — get yours here. Developer-ID signed for a clean, safe install — macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon.

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