Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Reminds me how windows 98 allowed using a HTML page as background. Said HTML could include videos.
    by arkh
  • Oh wow, that's seriously awesome. I did manage to reverse engineer the private screensaver `.appex` framework and make it work for Aerial 4 (I released a sample project/documentation last week here alongside v4 for those who want : https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/AppexSaverMinimal).

    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.

    by cwizou
  • These damned wallpapers gave me my worst experience with Apple. MacOS would delete them and redownload automatically over and over again, using almost a terrabyte of data per week.

    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...

    by markdown
  • Apple's best video wallpaper is "Macintosh". I am interested in how it works.
    by musicale
  • Really nice work. We went down a similar rabbit hole recently and reverse engineered the Aerials catalogue to figure out how Apple wires this stuff up, so seeing another open source project doing this is great. The detail I love most and one I can't replicate on our own tool is how the animation persists between the login window and the live desktop. We built phonto as a cross platform take on the same idea, https://github.com/museslabs/phonto. I was about to start writing an article on the whole reverse engineering process and this might be the nudge I needed to start working on it.
    by tharropoulos
  • Wow, thank you for this. I've been working on a screensaver suite but LegacyScreenSaver is so janky. I was hoping someone would figure out apple's private wallpaper framework and you did!
    by postalcoder
  • As much (fairly well deserved) hate as Tahoe gets, the video wallpapers and transparency are such a fun Windows Vista vibe I get nostalgia. Time to set this up with the Vista waterfall wallpaper and reallllyyy feel like it’s 2007!
    by buildbot
  • Very neat. I was confused at first, I was like you can download the video screensavers.. why scrape the frames. Then I saw your comment and read I can use my own videos for desktop and lock screen. Great work! Dont bury the lede! A title with the hook of what and how would be super helpful!
    by encore2097

Explore Birbla archives