Behind The Build

A Voronoi diagram answers one question: which point are you closest to? Ask it a few thousand times per second with moving seeds and you get something that looks alive.

Slime mold is one of the most fascinating organisms alive. It has no brain, no neurons, no plan — and it still finds the shortest path. Here's how I put that on your desktop.

Silk Aurora's ribbons of teal and violet never tear, never z-fight, and never repeat. Here's how a single 2D fragment pass pulls that off.

The Lorenz Attractor wallpaper solves actual differential equations in real time. Here's why the butterfly wing never repeats — and why that's the whole point.

Three rules. Hundreds of agents. The flock shapes that emerge look like nothing a programmer wrote — because nobody did. Here's how boids work.

No footage, no loop — Aurora Borealis generates the northern lights every frame in a shader. Here's the math behind the curtains.

Deep space is the ultimate live wallpaper theme. Here is why real-time GPU rendering beats video loops for space backgrounds, plus four flagship scenes.

I wanted a wallpaper that felt like a living star, not a five-second video on loop. Here's how Ignis simulates the sun's surface in real time, and why that choice keeps your Mac quiet.

Perlin Flow Fields moves thousands of particles at once, which sounds expensive. Here's how it stays cheap — the trick is where the work happens, not how little of it there is.

A video loop is the obvious way to build a live wallpaper app. Here's why we didn't, and what OffscreenCanvas actually buys you instead.

Real gravitational lensing is a general relativity problem. Here's the shortcut that gets a convincing result in real time without solving one.

Our best-selling wallpaper started as a completely different idea. Here's what changed, and why the version that shipped is nothing like the first draft.