Reactive Wallpaper
Your Mac desktop, alive.
What it does
I built Reactive Wallpaper for a truly native experience, no web wrappers, no video files, just Metal shaders on the GPU. All 45 effects are hand-written fragment shaders. Cursor position is passed as a uniform, so animations react to your mouse in real time. Since macOS has no native live wallpaper API, I render into a window layer behind desktop icons. Multi-display, pauses when covered or on battery. One-time purchase. No subscriptions, ever. Would love your feedback.
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- IRI reverse engineered macOS to allow custom Lock Screen wallpapersSep 2025 · cindori.com · ▲82
Hi HN, I'm Oskar, a solo indie Mac developer from Sweden. For those in the Mac community, you might know me from my other apps like Sensei and Trim Enabler. For years, I've been frustrated by the lack of customisation of macOS. In particular the Lock Screen which supports animated wallpapers, but only ones provided by Apple. There's never been a way to add your own personal videos. I decided to figure out how to solve this, and the result is Backdrop 2.0. Backdrop is my Live Wallpaper app for Mac, it can play video wallpapers on your desktop. And now it can play on your Lock Screen too. The…
- IRI reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapersMay 2026 · github.com · ▲428
Ever since Apple introduced their video wallpapers I wanted to be able to put custom videos there. I decided to reverse engineer and see what I can do. 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…
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