Hand your Mac to someone for a demo without showing everything

macOS has no setting that puts a password on an app of your choosing, so handing your Mac over for a demo comes down to three moves: put away what you can, use the locks a few Apple apps have built in, and for a long or unsupervised session, use a separate user account. If one private app has to stay open while someone else drives, Shoji can lock just the app in front and leave the rest of your Mac as it is.

What a person at your Mac can see in a minute

Before deciding what to lock, look at your Mac the way a curious guest would. Nobody has to go digging. Most of it is one keystroke away.

• Command-Tab lists every running app.
• Mission Control, with Control-Up Arrow or a swipe up on the trackpad, spreads every open window across the screen.
• Notification banners slide in with the sender and the first line of a message.
• The browser’s address bar suggests sites from your history and bookmarks as soon as someone types a letter.
• Open Recent, in the File menu of most apps, lists the documents you worked on last.
• Spotlight, with Command-Space, searches the names and contents of your files and email.

None of this takes any skill. It is what people do without thinking once the thing they were shown stops holding their attention.

Clear the stage before you hand it over

A few minutes of tidying covers most of it.

1. Quit, do not hide. Command-H only hides an app, and a hidden app comes straight back from the Dock or Command-Tab. Command-Q closes it. Quit anything with private content: mail, chat, notes, banking, the client folder open in Finder.
2. Silence notifications. Open Control Center from the menu bar, click Focus and turn on Do Not Disturb. If the demo goes on a projector or a shared screen, also look in System Settings under Notifications, where you can stop notifications while the display is mirrored or shared.
3. Put the demo app in full screen. Click the green button at the top left of its window, or press Control-Command-F in apps that support it. The app gets a Space of its own, with nothing else showing behind it.
4. Give the browser a clean start. If the demo runs in Safari, a separate profile keeps your history, bookmarks and signed-in accounts out of the address bar. Safari on macOS 14 and later has profiles, set up in its settings, so make one called Demo and open the demo in a window from it.

This works well for a demo you stay beside. Its weakness is the app you cannot quit: the notes you are presenting from, a chat you are waiting on, the mail you need the moment the demo ends.

Lock what macOS already lets you lock

A handful of Apple apps can lock part of themselves behind your password or Touch ID. Each one covers only its own content, but each is worth turning on.

• Notes. Select a note and use the lock button in the toolbar. A locked note shows its title in the list and nothing else until you unlock it, so give sensitive notes a dull first line.
• Photos. In the Photos settings, turn on the option to use Touch ID or your password, and the Hidden and Recently Deleted albums ask for it before they open.
• Safari private windows. Safari’s Privacy settings include an option to require Touch ID or your password before locked private browsing windows can be seen again.

Screen Time can block an app as well. Its App Limits stop an app once a daily time allowance is used up, and if you have set a Screen Time passcode, going past the limit needs it. It was made for daily habits rather than a ten-minute demo, though, and setting a limit and removing it again each time is more work than the demo.

Everything else, from Mail and Messages to a spreadsheet of salaries, has no lock of its own.

When a separate account is the right answer

If the person will use your Mac for a long time, or without you beside them, give them their own account. macOS keeps your personal folders closed to other accounts, and nothing they do touches your apps or your logins.

• Guest User. In System Settings, open Users & Groups, click the info button next to Guest User and turn on the option that allows guests to log in. Anything a guest creates is deleted when they log out.
• A demo account. For a demo you give often, add a standard user in Users & Groups, install and set up the demo there once, and switch to it when needed.

Switching is quicker with Fast User Switching in the menu bar: in System Settings, open Control Center and set Fast User Switching to show in the menu bar.

The cost is setup. A demo that depends on your own data, accounts or files does not exist in the other account until you put it there, which is why many people end up handing over their own login anyway.

Lock just the private app with Shoji

That leftover app is what Shoji’s App Lock is for. One of its five ways to draw the screen locks just the app in front, and it was made for handing your Mac over for a demo.

1. Switch to the app you want kept private, such as the notes you are presenting from.
2. Press Option-Command-L, or lock that app from Shoji’s menu bar controls.
3. Switch to the app you are demoing and hand the Mac over.

The private app stays locked until you open it with Touch ID or your Mac password. The password goes straight to macOS to check and is never stored, logged or sent. Everything else on the Mac stays as it was, so the other person can click around the demo without you leaning over their shoulder.

Two other modes help at the edges of a demo:

• Chat apps kept blurred. If you are presenting with someone sitting beside you, Messages, Slack and Mail can stay blurred unless you are the one using them, so a reply arriving mid-demo cannot be read at a glance. Hold Option over one to peek. This guards against glances; it does not lock those apps. Hide Slack, Messages and Mail when someone walks up to your Mac goes into that mode.
• The whole Mac. When you take the Mac back and step away, Command-L slides a screen over everything on every display.

The limits matter here. Locking an app protects that app. Files in Finder, browser history and any other app you left open are still there, so the clear-the-stage steps above still apply, and a long unsupervised session still calls for a separate account. Shoji is not protection against malware, cameras or screen recording by other apps. It asks for no Screen Recording, Accessibility or Full Disk Access permission, because it never captures the screen or reads windows. It costs $14 once, is free for 24 hours, and runs on macOS 14 or later, on Apple silicon and Intel.

Questions

Can I put a password on any app in macOS? Not with a built-in setting. A few Apple apps lock parts of themselves, such as locked notes and the Hidden album in Photos, and Screen Time can block an app behind its passcode once its daily limit is used up. Locking an app of your choosing, on demand, takes a separate app.

Is a guest account enough for a quick demo? It is the safest choice, but the demo has to work there: the app installed, signed in and set up. For a quick demo on your own login, quit private apps, silence notifications and lock what is left.

Will notifications show up during a demo? Yes, unless you turn them off. Do Not Disturb, under Focus in Control Center, holds them back until you turn it off again.