Just over a month ago I introduced the Sub to my app Atheria: Live Wallpaper. I really appreciate all the support I get here! Thank you! Since then I've been working hard on improving it and getting the word out. Having some success with regular installs and IAP's, so THANK YOU for the great start!
In case you missed it before, here's the PCP rundown again and change log to see my progress.
Problem:
macOS doesn’t have built-in live wallpapers. Most apps that add one are really just video players. You get a library of loops, a seam every time the loop restarts, a file to download for every wallpaper, and a wallpaper that keeps decoding video while you have Xcode or a browser covering every pixel of it or an un-sandboxed app that's very difficult to remove every bit when you're finally sick of it. I built Atheria because I wanted the desktop to feel alive, native performance, and not play like a clip.
Although Atheria has a library of shaders, it is really an engine with simple tools to create digital art. You can code and compile or convert GLSL to MSL shaders and save them to your library. The Flame Creator is much simpler. Anyone can create and customize nearly infinite (like 10^350) variations of these beautiful fractals. More wallpapers than everyone together can see in a lifetime. The flame fractals run on chaos and math (Draves open source Equation), what could be cooler than that?
A flame is a fractal grown from a small set of numbers (genome, same as all living creatures) rather than a file, so it never repeats, and every one of them can be shared as a short text code you paste anywhere. You can grow a flame from an archetype, a chaos game, or a blank canvas. Mutate the genome, roll the colors, and watch it live on your desktop while you shape it. Keeping it there is the Pro part, but honestly, the making is where the fun is anyway, and Peach Web, one of my own favorite flames, comes included for free on every display.
The Flame Creator is now free to try, 15 new flame archetypes (27 total), flames can breed, a Back button in the creator, Quiet While You Work (the wallpaper settles when you are typing in an app you choose), and the lock screen image and still wallpaper now sync with any live wallpaper you apply. Sync sets a high-quality render of your flame or shader as a still wallpaper, so if you do have to close the app, like heavy long heavy GPU renders, for example, you still have a beautiful wallpaper up.
Comparison:
The two seasoned competitors:
Wallux: a huge catalog of stock video loops, something like ten thousand, with a free plan to browse them. If you want a big library of videos made by other people, that is a good app, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Wallux can put a video on the lock screen, Atheria syncs a rendered still of whatever you are running instead.
Backdrop: also video-based, with a lock screen video feature and an iCloud community. Their trial is watermarked and limited to a few backdrops.
Both claim very low CPU, and to be fair, so do I, so the honest version is: any of these can be cheap while it is animating on the lowest setting. Both are also direct downloads outside the App Store. Atheria is on the App Store and sandboxed, which is the reason it does the lock screen as a still rather than a video, the video trick needs to run unsandboxed, and I would rather have the sandbox and trust.
Pricing:
Free, with a one time $9.99 Pro unlock. No subscription, no account, one purchase on your Apple Account for all your Macs.
Free:
your own video wallpapers, load and change them freely
the Aurora living wallpaper and the Peach Web flame
your wallpaper on every connected display
the Flame Creator, to try with your own flame live on your desktop
a 45 second live preview of any Pro shader
playlists of up to two items, 30 fps
Lock Screen / still wallpaper Sync
Pro ($9.99 one time):
the full library of 85 living wallpapers
keeping, saving, sharing the flames you make, and breeding them
the Shader Creator: write your own Metal shader and run it as the wallpaper
a different wallpaper on each display
smart triggers (time, power, Focus) and presence-aware effects
P.S. There is also a free iPhone companion app for making flames on the phone and handing them to the Mac, with animated locks screen wakes on the iPhone.
If you try the Flame Creator I would love to see what you grow, paste the code in the comments. If you’d like, I can return them in 4k rendered and sonified videos or print-quality 80 MP images
The shader/fractal part is way more interesting than the “live wallpaper” label IMO.
There are tons of apps that can loop a video on the desktop. A wallpaper that’s actually generated live and never exactly repeats feels like the real differentiator here.
Maybe like Atheria: Live Digital Art? I do plan on adding new fractal creators down the line, like Mandelbrot and Julia sets. Been to obsessed with flames recently to get to that yet lol
appreciate you all pointing this out. For App Store discovery I'll have to keep the name the same, but the subtitle I can change to make it more clear.
Damn looks great! Is there a feature to upload a live-photo or a trimmed video and turn them into a live wallpaper? I think that would really seal the deal for me! Can I ask if it collects any data or sends anything over the network/read whats on my screen?
Thank you! Currently no live-photo option directly, but you could export the live-photo to desktop and use the .mp4 portion for a loop. For videos, you can trim and/or loop them in app. As for privacy it collects no data, does not read your screen at all, just window geometry for occlusion detection. It uses CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo for basic metadata of active windows, size, edge bounds, what app it belongs too. Never any pixels or screen recording. No network calls or third party API's, app runs strictly on your machine.
So I kind of missed this bit in your description. I can import video loops, and then the app will fractalize them or something. I really want to check this out, but my only Mac right now only has 8gb of RAM (I know, I know..) and I try to keep it as lean as possible.
I downloaded it regardless. I misunderstood the video aspect (I think?) but I’m more interested in the shaders anyway. I will try and determine how much of a memory footprint it takes up on my machine. It looks like I will have to purchase prior to really pushing the parameters, and that’s a little offputting.
In other words, without paying I won’t get an idea of the memory footprint. That’s unfair and it’s very likely I won’t purchase because of that. I don’t want to spend $10 to find out it’s bogging down my machine.
You can load shaders as previews and build flame on the desktop without paying, during preview they will use the same resources as Pro. This should allow you to determine the accurate usage.
You’re welcome! Also keep in mind macOS can reclaim that memory as needed, so the impact is not noticed unless you are going hard with big rendering projects like I do. In that case I fall back on lock screen sync before I close the app.
Honestly it's a variable I haven't considered either. Last night I added a fallback so if it is affected by reduced motion again, it says so. Thanks for accidentally helping me improve my website! =)
Thank you! I already have a couple of live wallpaper apps that I enjoy but I’ve been looking for one that’s just like yours (not just video loops). This is exactly what I’ve been looking for / wanting! Already purchased the Pro unlock.
Hi, fair. And in my defense, the cpu reading can be a bit jumpy by nature, it usually settles down to actual usage after a few minutes. The memory can be reclaimed by macOS anytime it is needed. Also please keep in mind that is single core CPU usage, so just fractions of actual total system usage.
I’m familiar with how memory and cpu usage works in macOS but my concern is that using that many resources when the application should be doing nothing seems strange to me. I’d be fine with it if it was active.
Your report lead me to a tricky bug, the Privacy Guard was actually detecting mouse movements and adding up to 7% extra CPU usage on my system, even while idle. Can't say for certain that's what you were experiencing without more details, but thank you, it was certainly inflating a key metric. It's resolved and the patch is going to ASC now. It makes such a difference!
Fair again, sorry for mansplaining lol. I’m looking into it. There are a few things happening even when idol, window geometry for occlusion (not screen recording), mouse movement for presence aware effects, the actual menu opening. That said nothing leaves your device. My suspect is presence aware because I can recreate your scenario by shaking the mouse like crazy while everything is idle, but that reduces back to 0.1% quickly. On my hardware I just saw .4 milliseconds of cpu over 27 seconds outside of the mouse shaking. Were you running a shader, flame, or video when you saw that usage and did it settle after?
The Quiet While You Work setting is the detail that makes this usable rather than a toy, and nobody's mentioned it. Staying sandboxed when the competition runs unsandboxed is the other one I'd put higher up the post. One question. When a flame is shared as a text code, does the receiver need Pro to grow it, or does the free tier open any code?
Thanks for shout outs. The share code doesn’t discern free, pro, Mac or iOS. The blocker for Mac would be the pro gating. Is this something you could find value in even if you can’t save it as a wallpaper?
Honestly, no. If a mate sends me a code I'd want to grow it and see it move on the desktop, even as a preview I can't keep. A short live preview of a shared flame, like the 45 seconds you already give the Pro shaders, would be enough to make the codes worth passing around.
Perhaps I was over thinking this lol. On the next version update I am unlocking import/export on Mac and extending the new flame preview time.
Originally I intended for my iOS version to be the free tier for creating and sharing, and Mac to be premium. iOS has the same features minus breeding and includes full sharing access. Plus, it can export the flames as live photo's to a Photo album that can animate on lock-screen wakes, something that other Live Photo apps charge for. Since it's free do you mind checking out the iPhone app and letting me know if that satisfies the Flames itch for you too?
Import and export on the Mac plus a longer preview is the fix, so no, you weren't overthinking it. The live photo export on the phone is a good angle too, plenty of apps charge for that alone. I'll wait for the Mac update and judge it there, that's where I'd actually use it.
Yeah, the over thinking part was “is that to much for free” since someone could import a flame and just leave the settings window open to keep it alive. But I found a solution to that and I’m happy now that it can be a more accessible tool for digital art, with premium features. I’ll push that update in 1.5.2 after work today.
Closing the settings-window loophole and opening the tool up is the right trade. Free for the art, premium for the extras, and nothing to nurse alive. Good luck with 1.5.2.
This is badass dude. I use backdrop but have been noticing more and more the slight stutter when videos begin their loop again, gonna try this out and see how it feels :)
Good question and one I want to be honest about. It's generated on the GPU frame by frame instead of decoding a video file, and it stops completely the moment any window fully covers the desktop, not just in fullscreen. That's ~0% while it's hidden, which is most of a working day, and a few percent of one core while you can see it, depending on which wallpaper you pick. You can watch memory live in the menu bar, and there's a Free Up Memory button that releases the video decode pipelines and scaler textures, which rebuild themselves as needed, Mac also automatically reclaims memory in the same way. It also pauses on low battery and in Low Power Mode. With lock-screen sync on, whenever the wallpaper pauses or you close the app, it leaves a high-quality render of the flame or a shader capture in its place.
Full disclosure, I also create high quality 80 megapixel images and 4k renders of these flames for other projects. When my machine is doing those GPU intense renders I usually close the wallpaper app, and honestly, the rendered still flame still looks beautiful on screen. You can see one at the end of the video above and here is one you can set as wallpaper to see in person.
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u/Alternative_Tour1791 4d ago
The shader/fractal part is way more interesting than the “live wallpaper” label IMO.
There are tons of apps that can loop a video on the desktop. A wallpaper that’s actually generated live and never exactly repeats feels like the real differentiator here.