Solace

Piroune Balachandran, Letian Wang, and a small crew of indie developers looked at their Macs one day and thought: why does this $3,000 machine have no idea what time of day it is? So they built Solace, a menu bar app that makes your Mac actually pay attention to the world outside. It watches the sunrise, tracks the sunset, reads the weather, and automatically switches your entire system between light mode, dark mode, and everything in between. Your wallpaper follows. Your screen warmth follows. Even when it's raining at noon, Solace switches to dark mode because why should your Mac pretend it's sunny when it's gloomier than a London winter?

Here's the thing—Apple built this stuff into macOS, but it's basic. Solace goes further with Evening Warmth, which gradually shifts your display from harsh 6500K daylight to a cozy 2700K candlelight glow starting at 8pm. It works across multiple monitors. It calculates exact solar times for your specific location and adjusts as seasons change. No cloud dependency—it all runs locally. Four ninety-nine. One-time purchase. This is the kind of app that makes you realize you've been manually toggling dark mode like a caveperson for years.