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17 Décembre 2020
I admit: I'm fascinated by Apple's new Dynamic Desktop feature, which became widely available with the launch of macOS Mojave last week. There's just something magical about a wallpaper that shows a fixed-point view that changes as your day goes by.
Dynamic Wallpapers for macOS Mojave. Dynamic Wallpaper Club Gallery Create Docs Sign in Hot New Best Subscribe to our Telegram Channel Genshin Impact KAYAT0 Hogwarts sinmari Big macOS Sur ManpreetSingh Pixel House NanoPro MacOS Big Sur jalbans17. After the download is complete, the macOS dynamic wallpaper will be applied on Windows 10 automatically. And the wallpaper will also change its theme based on your local time. If you want to try out other macOS dynamic wallpapers on Windows 10 then you will find the app under the system tray. Open it and select a theme of your choice. We invite you to expand your Dynamic Desktop with our downloadable Dynamic Desktops for macOS. An alternative to using the 24 Hour Wallpaper app, these downloads do not require an app and work directly with macOS.
However, Apple only offers two Dynamic Desktop wallpapers by default: One a beautiful photo of the Mojave desert, and the other a somewhat bland, ever-changing color gradient.
If that's not enough for you, there's a solution: A couple of them, in fact.
SEE ALSO: This app solves the most annoying thing about Mojave's Dark Mode
Back in June, developer Marcin Czachurski discovered that Apple's dynamic wallpapers are a bunch of images and a short text file describing certain properties of the image, such as altitude and azimuth (which pinpoint the position of the Sun when the image was taken).
With this knowledge, you can create a dynamic wallpaper yourself. The technical aspects of it, described here, aren't too complicated, and Czachurski even created a small command line app that makes it easier. But taking a bunch of high-quality photographs — especially if you want to do a fixed view of the same place at different times in the day — will likely be a bit much for most people.
Luckily, some crafty folks have already created dynamic wallpapers using this method. Czachurski himself shared a beautiful Google Earth-based wallpaper — you can find it here. And people on Reddit have shared their creations or findings here.
Dynamic wallpapers aren't simple images; they come in the form of .heic files. To install them, first set your wallpaper to any dynamic wallpaper in Mojave. Then just right click on the .heic file and choose 'Set Desktop Picture.' The wallpaper should show up and continue to dynamically change as your day goes on. To make things a little easier, you can also move the .heic files to the /Library/Desktop Pictures folders, and Mojave will then list them as options when you go to Settings — Destkop & Screen Saver. Beware, though, that if the files aren't properly constructed, things can get messy; for example, Apple might not show the correct icons for these new dynamic backgrounds.
There's an even easier solution. An app called 24 Hour Wallpaper, available on Apple's App Store offers a total of 58 wallpapers. Some of these have a fixed view, while some are simply a mix of different images related to the same topic, but they all look pretty good. The app is compatible with macOS Mojave but it also works on older macOS versions, down to macOS 11.11. The catch is that the app is not free; it costs $6.99.
I've tested the app and it has a surprising amount of options, including the ability to choose any location in the world, customize sunrise and sunset times and set a 'playlist' that continuously changes your dynamic wallpaper to a different set of images at an interval of your choosing. You can set different wallpapers on different displays as well — though I haven't found an option to set a different wallpaper for each virtual desktop.
There's even an option to let macOS do the work, which disables most of the extra features and essentially just sets a new dynamic wallpaper while the app resides in the background as a simple wallpaper gallery.
Hopefully, someone will create a repository of dynamic wallpapers down the road and finding these will be as easy as finding a regular wallpaper. For now, though, any of the methods described above should quench your thirst for dynamic desktop goodness.
To go with dark mode, macOS Mojave introduced a feature called 'dynamic wallpapers'. Once enabled, a dynamic wallpaper would cycle between a number of related images1, showing one that was appropriate for the time of day.
Keeping with tradition macOS Catalina includes a new default wallpaper, and while it is a dynamic desktop, it works a bit differently: It only has two images rather than sixteen, and rather than switching between them based on time, the wallpaper is set based on whether your appearance preference is set to light or dark mode. This style is even acknowledged separately in System Preferences as 'Automatic' rather than 'Dynamic'.
While I was enamoured with Mojave's dynamic desktops at first, I ended up switching to a regular wallpaper after some time. I don't use dark mode only at night2, and so I'd often be left with a dark UI and a searing bright wallpaper.
So naturally I was excited to create my own dynamic desktops with this new style, but like with the previous ones, Apple hasn't said anything about how one would go about doing that.
As it turns out though Mattt at NSHipster had done some digging around into the format for Mojave and that proved to be a good starting place.
Encoded within the heic file for the default dynamic wallpaper for Mojave was a metadata item named 'solar', which detailed the position of the sun in the sky in terms of its altitude and azimuth, for each of the images.
The general format for the solar metadata was as follows:
The d and l were bits that Mattt wasn't able to figure out; more about those in a bit.
And here's the data in it's XMP form:
Equipped with this information and the companion Playgrounds, I set about trying to figure out Catalina's dynamic desktop format. It's worth reading the NSHipster post before proceeding any further since I'm leaning heavily on that.
I hadn't installed Catalina at this time, so I obtained the wallpaper from here (it's the Dynamic.heic file).
Reading the metadata, while there wasn't a solar item to be found, there was one named apr. Here's the data included with that:
Here's what I got after putting it through a PropertyListDecoder:
Gone is all the solar positioning data from Mojave's format, and this is much simpler. Just two keys, with two integer values.
d and l, it turns out, are the indices for the dark and light wallpapers, respectively. Their inclusion in the Mojave format suggests that the 'Automatic' style might also be enabled for these wallpapers in the future, however this doesn't seem to be true as of the first beta for Catalina. Swinsian 1 12 4.
The XMP format is also slightly tweaked, with the apple_desktop:solar tag being replaced with an apple_desktop:apr tag
That's all the information we need to make new wallpapers of our own!
The code below is tweaked from Mattt's aforementioned Playground.
First we have references to the two light and dark wallpapers. These must be stored in the Playground's Resources folder:
Next, a location for where the final image must be stored:
Catalina makes some changes to how permissions work for certain folders including the desktop, so you might need to change the location.
We then create a CGImageDestination:
Then we create a metadata item and populate it as per the XML structure:
We then convert the images to CGImages and write them to file, including the metadata along with the first image:
And lastly we finalise the conversion:
Once this has finished executing, we should have our image at the destination URL, ready for use!
The automatic wallpapers work in Mojave too, although setting them somewhat glitches out the UI in System Preferences.
Even though iOS 13 ships with its own dynamic wallpapers, neither the official Catalina wallpaper nor any that I've generated seem to work there. Hopefully that's just a beta bug.
You can find the full source code for the above on my fork of Mattt's repo. I have also made some dynamic wallpapers from the wallpapers shipping with iOS 13, which can be downloaded here.
The two wallpapers bundled with Mojave, the eponymous 'Mojave' and 'Solar Gradients', include 16 images each.
↩I switch between themes enough that I even made my first Mac app, Nocturnal, to make it easier to do so. Pacifist 3 5 6 download free.
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