I built Phosphene to sell it, but the existing competitors were polished enough that the time it would have taken to catch up wasn't going to pay off. So I'm open-sourcing it.

WallpaperExtensionKit.framework is what powers macOS wallpapers. It controls what’s shows in the Settings app. It took a lot of trial and error to replicate the behavior, but the result is that your custom wallpapers appear alongside everything else. I wanted to have an “add” button there too, but I couldn’t find a way to do so, so there’s a companion app that will put your video where it needs to be.

Unlike Apple's Aerials, the video keeps playing on the desktop (not just the lock screen). The renderer drives AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer directly with PTS-offset gapless looping, and pauses or downshifts based on thermal state, battery level, brightness, and window occlusion.

It’s free and works well.

However, it may definitely get broken by Apple, as you note.

I won't use it, myself, because I can't deal with wallpaper moving behind my work (I also can't listen to music, while I work. Maybe it's a "generational" thing). Also, I use a 49-inch ultrawide, so it might be vomit-inducing.

I remember some other utility that played wallpaper videos, but it wasn't anywhere near as nicely done.

I originally thought that this was an extension to keep a video running in the background.

It simply allows you to add your own videos to the built-in Apple ones (much more useful to me).

I see what you did there :)

We shouldn't encourage people who can't properly read and understand a comment before replying either, but here we are talking to you who jumped on correcting the “2 or 3 years” to “19 years” without noticing that “2007” was in the post so the poster was obviously well aware of that.

> being unable to subtract two simple numbers is not funny

1. That is not the joke. It is referencing how humans experience the passage of time at massively different rates to the actual reality, especially as we age.

2. Humour is subjective. So is, to an extent, the amount of it that is acceptable in a given environment. Sense of humour is sometimes objectively non-existent, as you helpfully illustrate by clear example.

Which is why I first included the possibility the commenter didn't know the current year.

>humans experience the passage of time at massively different rates

The commenter did not say anything related to this. The relative speed of time was not referenced.

>that is acceptable in a given environment

Humor is not very acceptable on this website compared to others, so it's important to protect this and not let outsiders from other sites to try and bring their humor here.

> > humans experience the passage of time at massively different rates

> The commenter did not say anything related to this. The relative speed of time was not referenced.

But it was implied, by the very common joke format. You made no direct reference to the current year. Your argument there would be more convincing if you were as clear and detailed in your meaning as you expect everyone else to be.

> and not let outsiders from other sites to try and bring their humor here.

Thank you, Mr Account-Created-In-2021, for defending those of us who have been around since 2013, 2011, and 2010, from the humour of outsiders like ourselves!

which waterfall are you talking about? i am also surprised to see how many wallpapers were apparently available on Vista. All I remember is the default green gradient thingie and I think I had the bamboo forest on at some point

IIRC at that time users were split fairly completely into three types: those who customised their OS look a lot, sometimes spending far too much time on it (I was one of them back then), those who had developed a preferred look and just kept that as much as possible between OS changes, and those who just used the defaults and got on with whatever else. This means the other wallpaper that someone at MS put effort into collecting together hardly ever got seen: many users kept the one default, and almost all who didn't had something that they chose from other sources. Maybe the other included images might have seen the light of day more often if there had been an explicit “choose your wallpaper” prompt as part of user on-boarding.

And I wasn't even using video wallpapers at the time.

Just discovered I had no internet 3 days into the month as my ISP had cut me off. Had to dig deep and spend hours I'll never get back trying to find out where all the data was going.

Here's a thread I just found now that shows others having similar issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1ii38g8/macbook_wall...

icons and text would get single-color backdrops though. no transparency back to the html

https://kagerou.glass/phosphene/

https://kagerou.glass

also, nice typography.

Apple's uses both for their own "Aerials" and they have a sync system to share the position between the screensaver player and the desktop player.

/System/Library/ExtensionKit/Extensions/WallpaperMacintoshExtension.appex

Can see the time and date being added here I think:

System6ControlPanel.program

    //
    //  System 6 Control Panel
    //  Macintosh 40th Anniversary
    //
    //  Copyright © 2024 Apple. All rights reserved.
    //
    //----------------------------------------------

    start simultaneous
        scale out
        let image = "System6ControlPanel"
        ...
        ...
        add time at 267, 165 name "Geneva12"
        add date at 274, 239 name "Geneva12"
    end simultaneous

Out of curiosity: how much did you need to steer Claude while working on this project, and how long did it have?

Asking partly because I see "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <[email protected]>", and partly because I keep hearing "so what do you do with all these agents", and this is a good example of what people do with all these agents.

On a similar note, I’d love to replace Aerials on tvOS with my own videos. I have yet to figure out how to craft a working data feed that the tvOS will accept using the secret mode that I believe is used in the retail store displays.

Anyhow, on topic, that windows 98 active desktop was the most unstable part of an already shaky OS. First thing to turn off when installing a new system. I mean, it would still crash if you looked at it wrong. But at least it was not dying for the fun of it anymore.

https://pastebin.com/XLhjr4pf https://github.com/kageroumado/swiftui-macos-skill

This was literally my first hack I did in high school in 2005. Doing something I’d never seen done before, a video wallpaper.

Step one, grab a handle to the video memory serving the wall paper. My “game trainer cheats” experience served me well. That was easy.

I had to figure out the hard way that per pixel calculations are extremely CPU taxing, the YUV to RGB video color space conversion. With a pirated Intel compiler I could get the naive blit into memory videy background working.

But then I wondered how other video apps were working so efficiently?

They used a GPU overlay! How it worked is you’d designate a color on your screen as the overlay color, and, when the screen was rendered, any pixel that was the overlay color was swapped with the full screen rendered video. I forget the specifics, it was some directX api. So, set the wallpaper to the hottest hot pink, run the renderer, and bobs your uncle, video wallpaper.

Everyone I showed this to was amazed, I really though I was on to something! Trouble was, I couldn’t get the damn thing to run on other people’s computers!

Little did I know or understand about the dreaded VCruntime redistributable. It wasn’t until 10 years later when I started working in industry I learned about “software distribution”. Linux makes it too easy, windows makes it too hard, static linking everything that isn’t network facing is probably the right approach.

I was so annoyed when Vista had the video wallpaper feature. “Man I was doing this years ago!”.

This is life. We discover things for ourselves, on our own time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45247396

I also tried the same with Wallpaper appexes, the reversing seemed easy enough, but WallpaperAgent refused to load them, so I still use the classic trick of using my own window with a video player on top of the wallpaper, and below the icons.

I will have a look and check what I missed.

> the video keeps playing on the desktop (not just the lock screen)