Mac Screensaver: 52 Generative Scenes, Native Swift, Free

4 min read

The first downloadable artifact on the site is live: a native macOS screensaver bundling 52 generative scenes. Plasmas, cellular automata (Game of Life, Reaction-Diffusion), agent sims (slime mold, boids, vector field flow), demoscene throwbacks (copper bars, sine scrollers, glenz vectors, Mode 7 floor), optical illusions, fractals (Mandelbrot, DLA snowflake), Win95-style 3D Pipes, auto-playing Pong and Tron, plus eye candy like Synthwave Grid, Aurora Borealis, and a flag wave with Pride / Trans / USA / Palestine / Ukraine.

Pure Swift + Core Graphics, no Metal, no JavaScript, no WebView. Every scene exposes its own knobs through the standard macOS Screen Saver "Options…" sheet. Pick a single scene or rotate through them all on a configurable interval. Several scenes (Bouncing Logo, Sine Scroller, C64 Demoscene, Search Light) accept your own custom text.

Download it from the new /downloads page or the dedicated screensavers detail page. Universal binary, Developer ID signed, notarized by Apple, ~350 KB. macOS 11 Big Sur or later.

Source on GitHub. Adding a new scene is one Swift file plus one line in the registry — the configure sheet, persistence, and rotation all pick it up automatically. PRs welcome.

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