Pixel Soup

I kept changing my wallpaper every few days and getting bored of it again. Downloading another image was never going to fix that, so I made the Mac cook its own.

See it run

How it works

• Every wallpaper is drawn live by a Metal shader. Nothing is a video or a downloaded image, so no two are ever the same.
• Eleven shapes, ten dither styles from Bayer to ASCII, twelve palettes, or build your own from up to five colours.
• Drop in a photo and it dithers that instead. It can also pull a palette straight out of the photo.
• Animated wallpapers play in a borderless window at desktop level, behind your icons, on every display at its own resolution.
• The pattern is drawn once per dither cell into a small texture and dithered per pixel in a second pass. That took a 6K frame from about 26 ms to about 2 ms.
• It pauses when windows cover the desktop and slows down in Low Power Mode. A still costs nothing once it is set.
• No account and no tracking. One payment, no subscription, on the Mac App Store or from the website, where it is free to try for 3 days.

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