Curiosity,
shipped.

Two apps, two unrelated problems

There are two products here and they have nothing to do with each other, which is deliberate. Both came from wanting something that did not exist rather than from looking for a gap in a market, and both are free because neither was built to be a business.

Hangly hangs a decorative charm from the top of your screen on a cord, swaying with real pendulum physics. It is click-through everywhere but the charm itself, and it never takes keyboard focus — the whole design constraint is that it must be incapable of interrupting you. 161 charms across 21 categories ship with it, any image of your own becomes a charm, and it runs on macOS 14 or newer and Windows 10 or newer including a native ARM64 build.

Vision is face recognition for the Mac with a native notch experience. You look at the machine and it knows you. Everything runs locally: no face data leaves your computer, no account is involved, and nothing depends on a server being up. It needs macOS 15 or newer and is at version 1.1.

Neither app is a component of the other, they share no code you would notice, and running both together is entirely normal. They appear on one page because the same person made them.

Hangly and Vision, compared

The most useful comparison here is not feature against feature — they do not compete — but requirement against requirement, so you can see at a glance whether your machine runs each one.

Who each one is for

Hangly suits you if you spend the day looking at a screen and would like something on it that is pleasant and asks nothing of you. It is the right pick over a desktop pet specifically when you cannot afford interruptions — if you present, teach, demo or screen-share, a roaming character will eventually walk across your slides and a charm structurally cannot. It also suits anyone who wants a particular cultural or lucky charm, or their own photograph, hanging on a cord.

Hangly is the wrong pick if what you actually want is a creature that moves about under its own control. That is a desktop pet, it is a different category, and the guides on this site recommend other people's apps for it without hedging.

Vision suits you if you unlock your Mac dozens of times a day and want that to happen by looking at it, and if you care that the recognition runs on your own hardware rather than someone's server. It is a small, quiet utility rather than a platform.

Vision is the wrong pick if you are on macOS 14 or earlier, since it requires macOS 15, or if you need enterprise identity management — it is a personal convenience, not an authentication product for an organisation.

Downloading and installing

Everything is free and nothing asks for an account. On a Mac, Hangly is a disk image you drag into Applications and it is signed and notarised, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning. On Windows, check Settings then System then About for your processor type first, because a Windows-on-ARM machine reports itself as x64 and taking the wrong build costs you the native performance — and expect one SmartScreen warning, because the Windows build is not code-signed yet.

• Download Hanglyall three builds
• Hangly for Mac
• Hangly for Windowsx64 and ARM64
• How to installstep by step, both platforms
• Vision
• Vision documentation
• Release historygenerated from the update feeds

Deciding between Hangly and something else

The comparison pages on this site put Hangly against the apps people actually weigh it against, and each one names where the other product wins — a comparison that concludes “ours” every time is an advertisement, and both readers and answer engines discount it.

• Every comparisoneight competitors
• Category guidescharms, pets and Mac customization
• Best desktop pets for Mac
• Hangly FAQfifty answers
• Hangly privacy