Since 15.4 macOS has closed off direct access to now-playing data, so Aura gathers it three ways at once: instant notifications from Music and Spotify, a snapshot of the system player, and a query to the app itself. Whichever answers first is what you see.

• Works with Music, Spotify and anything that hands metadata to the system.
• Drag to scrub, plus shuffle, repeat and like wherever the player supports them.
• A system volume slider sits next to it and works independently of the player.
• The artwork sets the panel's glow, so the look changes with the track.

While the panel is closed the notch reports what is going on. Only one event shows at a time: instant indicators like volume cut ahead of everything, calm ones like the calendar wait their turn.

• Track with artwork and a visualiser, volume, brightness, charging and low battery.
• Headphones connecting and disconnecting, timers, and a calendar event five minutes ahead.
• Point at an activity and the visualiser gives way to player controls.

A shelf for files right where your hand already goes. No hunting for a Finder window, no minimising apps to reach the desktop: the notch takes a file at any moment and holds it as long as you need.

• The panel opens on the Tray tab while you are still dragging.
• Files stay put across windows and desktops until you take them.
• From the tray a file drags on into any app, just like from Finder.

The switches you normally go to the menu bar or System Settings for. All in one widget, all acting on the system rather than inside a single app.

• The microphone is muted system-wide, so every app goes quiet at once.
• Pick audio output and input devices without opening Settings.
• A screenshot straight to the clipboard, and a brightness slider.

An Aura theme is more than the panel. It has a system half: pick a theme and the system appearance, accent, wallpaper and Dock behaviour change along with the panel colours. Every setting is written to the real system keys, no magic.

• Dock: auto-hide with delay and speed, icon size and magnification, position, minimise effect.
• Menu bar: 24-hour clock, seconds, date, weekday, battery percentage.
• Finder: extensions, hidden files, path and status bars, folders first, default view.
• System animations, screenshot format and hot corners.

macOS cannot set a video as wallpaper. The only honest way without private APIs is a window of your own at desktop level, and that is what Aura does: the video sits above the wallpaper picture and below the Finder icons.

• Clicks pass straight through, so working with files is unchanged.
• While Aura is not running the desktop shows a frame from the same video, so nothing jumps.
• Each display gets its own window, so the video is not stretched across screens.

Windows are arranged through the same Accessibility mechanism the system's own Move & Resize uses. No injection, no disabled SIP: one checkbox in privacy settings is all it takes.

• Layouts: bsp, columns, rows, master, monocle and free placement.
• Gaps, a focus border, per-app rules and your own key combinations.
• Settings live in wm.json and are re-read live: save the file and the layout rebuilds.

The notch understands more than a click. Pointer and trackpad work over it like over any normal system element, so the player and the tray are reachable without lifting your hand.

• Hovering with a hold opens the panel; the delay is adjustable.
• Swiping down and up opens and closes it, left and right moves between tracks.
• Dragging a file onto the notch opens the tray by itself.

The two things that go missing most often: what you copied five minutes ago, and the screenshot you just took. Both live in the panel header and open in one click.

• Clipboard history opens straight from the panel header.
• Recent screenshots sit in the same place and drag into any app.

An app that reaches into system settings has to be able to put everything back. Before its first change Aura reads and records the original value of every key it is about to touch.

• The snapshot is kept on disk, so the rollback works even after a reinstall.
• No setting changes silently: all of it is visible in the settings window.
• Restoring puts the system back exactly where it was before Aura.