How to Use macOS Mojave's New Dynamic Desktop Feature

[ignatius345]

Well besides someone providing a hack to load our own images. I just need my intervalometer and a place where I can safely leave about $5000 in camera equipment during the day.

The app 24 Hour Wallpaper is quite awesome for this. It's $7

http://www.jetsoncreative.com/24hourwallpaper/

Been using it for the past year or so and love it. Gives you a choice of image sizes appropriate to your resolution. The 5K ones look quite great.

I do wish it had the ability to let you load your own images though, and from what I'm seeing with the .heic-based format, we may be able to roll our own desktops in Mojave. I would actually love it if there was an App Store section where you could buy them. Heck, maybe I'd make some of my own and see if I could sell them

 

[jonnysods]

Hopefully since this is the Mac someone will hack something together to make us able to add our own dynamic wallpapers. I do professional photography and would totally spend all day making a good photo for this.

This would be a neat feature to add to iOS as well. I've always been disappointed that Apple hasn't done more with motion wallpapers beyond the floating dots. The 3D Touch wallpapers have never seemed very useful to me because I never press on them—it would be better if they would just activate an animation when you lift your phone up. I don't need a bunch of cheesy effects but feel like some subtle ones like rain hitting on a window with drops slowly rolling down would be cool.

They need to same fire screen on the iPhone as they have on the watch. Freaking love that one it would be killer on my iPhone.

 

[mabhatter]

I wonder if they'll provide the capability and documentation to make your own dynamic wallpaper at some point.

Sure. Like they provided for the iOS dynamic wallpapers.

Um still waiting here with the “bubbles” wallpaper everyone seems to have forgot about.

 

[timborama]

Oh please. Lately their QC has been trash, instead of fixing what needs fixing this is what they come up with? Oh boy can't wait to crack my piggy bank open. I used to be a mac user but in my opinion the last few years the value add for what you spend on a Mac just isn't there anymore. The machines and software are not what they used to be. No one seems to want to admit that, instead everyone ooohs and ahhs over features like this that pose no real benefit to the user. Seems the new Apple mantra is form over function. Rather than try to be witty and insult me, change my mind... I dare you.

Completely agree. Seems to be a huge number of engineering “pet projects” rather than working on the hard (necessary) stuff. 50,000 engineering (non-sales) staff and this is what they’re doing. LOL. This is the reason I haven’t bought any Apple products in 5 years.

 

[sumo.do]

My mood shifts with the time if day so this might all work well.

 

[ivan86]

Great to see Apple wasting resources on this junk instead of fixing age-old defects. Gee, I sure hope there’s some kind of “touch bar” support for this. That’ll be as useful as rubbing two turds together.

Where’s the big ground-up rewrite of Finder we were promised years ago?

I wish that at least "Right Size All Columns Individually" option in Finder finally is fixed and works persistently, but not only once (just like double click on the column border).


Updated to Mojave. App store does not see app updates although they are there. Here we go again - the waiting game until the most basic stuff gets fixed in the point release... :-|

 

[sumo.do]

I wonder if it adjusts to an eclipse?

 

[MobiusStrip]

It only took Apple how many decades to provide correct sorting in Finder (folders ON TOP), although it's still broken on the desktop. And the Delete key (on the few Apple computers that have them) still does nothing in Finder, WTF.

Jony Ive is the Trump of product design. With no beneficial ideas of his own, he only seeks to destroy the achievements of his predecessors. Thus Apple's embarrassing regressions, like music-centric phones with no headphone jack; phones that are "thinner" at the expense of battery life and that can't withstand being used for their primary purpose, so people bury them in bulky, tacky cases; glued-together computers with soldered-in drives and RAM... and pathetic keyboards that suck even when they work.

All at increasingly astronomical prices. Apparently customers have to foot the bill for engineers who get paid to dick around with idiotic shifting backgrounds and inventing new ways to ruin UI.

 

[chrono1081]

About as useful as all the emojis

Apple doesn't make them, they simply adhere to the Unicode standard, otherwise you'd have black x's anytime someone from another OS sent you something with an emoji in it.

 

[Sandstorm]

Does it also toggle your light/dark mode automatically?

It does not.

I would love option to link Light/Dark mode setting to the Night shift schedule...

 

[FirstNeverFollows]

It does not.

I would love option to link Light/Dark mode setting to the Night shift schedule...

This.

 

[dogslobber]

This feature sounds like it’s low value. Why wasn’t the engineering team who implemented it doing actual bug fixing elsewhere?

 

[topmounter]

Hello new feature #outrage

I'm surprised Apple only included two options.

Maybe they'll sell additional Dynamic Desktop images in the app store

In the not so distant past, we had to pay for major OS updates.

 

[gsmornot]

Oh please. Lately their QC has been trash, instead of fixing what needs fixing this is what they come up with? Oh boy can't wait to crack my piggy bank open. I used to be a mac user but in my opinion the last few years the value add for what you spend on a Mac just isn't there anymore. The machines and software are not what they used to be. No one seems to want to admit that, instead everyone ooohs and ahhs over features like this that pose no real benefit to the user. Seems the new Apple mantra is form over function. Rather than try to be witty and insult me, change my mind... I dare you.

I have to assume there are multiple levels to the engineers employed. Lower level employees not yet up to speed on the bigger items are given more basic items like this to work on. It gets them working in the OS and makes them part of the team. Not everyone can be the one when it comes to the more complex items. I for one would not be able to make the dynamic wallpaper work but I can at my level pick one of the two to enjoy while I work on other things. I don't care to change your mind, don't need to, but I think it's fair to say there are enough people on the team that some can work on lower level additions without hurting the overall team.

 

[chucker23n1]

The machines and software are not what they used to be. No one seems to want to admit that

Plenty of people here express that sentiment, so I don't know what gives you the impression that "no one seems to want to admit that".

 

[turbineseaplane]

It'd be nice if they'd included more than just 2...

Weren't there any scenic places in California to get some dynamic wallpapers done?

The sand dunes are pretty boring.

 

[sumo.do]

This is pretty cool. But I noticed the sunset and sunrise are coming up in the wrong side of my screen for me...

 

[joshjet]

The app 24 Hour Wallpaper is quite awesome for this. It's $7

http://www.jetsoncreative.com/24hourwallpaper/

Been using it for the past year or so and love it. Gives you a choice of image sizes appropriate to your resolution. The 5K ones look quite great.

I do wish it had the ability to let you load your own images though, and from what I'm seeing with the .heic-based format, we may be able to roll our own desktops in Mojave. I would actually love it if there was an App Store section where you could buy them. Heck, maybe I'd make some of my own and see if I could sell them

Thanks for using the app! There were only a SMALL number of people using it prior to a few days ago.

We have a crude Dynamic Desktop editor that we use with 24 Hour Wallpaper. I want to release it but it probably won't happen this year. There's a lot of testing needed and UI to be made.

24 Hour Wallpaper uses a format based on periods of the day. We find this superior to Apple's sun angle model.*
*(I appreciate Apple's design and would love to hear the person who wrote it explain the benefits of their format relative to ours.)

Our big realization after writing our engine two times was that what's important is the perception of what time it is in the image, not what time it actually is. The shipping engine is the third one we wrote and it is designed around perception of time rather than scientific time.

In 24 Hour Wallpaper, each wallpaper has an ordered image list for each period of the day (sunrise, day, sunset, night). The engine can take any number of images for each period (1...n). So you can make a DD with our format with just 4 images (sunrise, day, sunset, night).

Apple's format does not specify the direction the camera is pointing. Without that information it's impossible to effectively guess how the shots will appear at a given time. Try looking towards a sunset and then away from it. Totally different. Apple's model doesn't account for this. So in the future they'll probably be stuck normalizing also.

Internally we have a spec for 32-image wallpapers that defines where the light should be in a frame for a given image in the sequence. This is how we continue to keep the wallpapers relatively consistent even though we have 58 highly varied wallpapers. The spec states for each frame where the sun and the moon are on screen and what the angle of light and shadow are.

The latest update to the app contains a converter that translates from the period model to Apple's sun angle model to generate DD format wallpapers. We found it was best to standardize on a single location in Apple's model, and assumed Apple would be testing the location they were using the most.

So I looked at the sun data in the Mojave default wallpaper, then spent a bunch of time with the sun data generator and Google Maps. After a while I found that one day and location that matches Apple's photo data well is September 23/24 at a location in the Mojave Preserve near where theirs would have been filmed. Conspiracy theorists can debate if this is intentional or not given the release date; it's something I've wondered.

Anyway, every DD format wallpaper generated by 24 Hour Wallpaper is coded as being taken at Mojave Preserve on September 23/24. What that means practically is with our model you can create a DD without thinking about sun angle, date, time, etc and output it in DD format with our app doing all the dirty work.

Anyway, thought you might appreciate the details. If the app does well we'll be able to get the editor out more quickly so enjoy

http://24hourwallpaper.com/

-josh

 

[Tozovac]

About as useful as all the emojis

Exactly. With things like this, ios 7, and Animojis, am I the only one sadly seeing the shark ready for jumping at the once great Apple Computer Co?

 

[ignatius345]

Thanks for using the app! There were only a SMALL number of people using it prior to a few days ago.

We have a crude Dynamic Desktop editor that we use with 24 Hour Wallpaper. I want to release it but it probably won't happen this year. There's a lot of testing needed and UI to be made.

24 Hour Wallpaper uses a format based on periods of the day. We find this superior to Apple's sun angle model.*
*(I appreciate Apple's design and would love to hear the person who wrote it explain the benefits of their format relative to ours.)

Our big realization after writing our engine two times was that what's important is the perception of what time it is in the image, not what time it actually is. The shipping engine is the third one we wrote and it is designed around perception of time rather than scientific time.

In 24 Hour Wallpaper, each wallpaper has an ordered image list for each period of the day (sunrise, day, sunset, night). The engine can take any number of images for each period (1...n). So you can make a DD with our format with just 4 images (sunrise, day, sunset, night).

Apple's format does not specify the direction the camera is pointing. Without that information it's impossible to effectively guess how the shots will appear at a given time. Try looking towards a sunset and then away from it. Totally different. Apple's model doesn't account for this. So in the future they'll probably be stuck normalizing also.

Internally we have a spec for 32-image wallpapers that defines where the light should be in a frame for a given image in the sequence. This is how we continue to keep the wallpapers relatively consistent even though we have 58 highly varied wallpapers. The spec states for each frame where the sun and the moon are on screen and what the angle of light and shadow are.

The latest update to the app contains a converter that translates from the period model to Apple's sun angle model to generate DD format wallpapers. We found it was best to standardize on a single location in Apple's model, and assumed Apple would be testing the location they were using the most.

So I looked at the sun data in the Mojave default wallpaper, then spent a bunch of time with the sun data generator and Google Maps. After a while I found that one day and location that matches Apple's photo data well is September 23/24 at a location in the Mojave Preserve near where theirs would have been filmed. Conspiracy theorists can debate if this is intentional or not given the release date; it's something I've wondered.

Anyway, every DD format wallpaper generated by 24 Hour Wallpaper is coded as being taken at Mojave Preserve on September 23/24. What that means practically is with our model you can create a DD without thinking about sun angle, date, time, etc and output it in DD format with our app doing all the dirty work.

Anyway, thought you might appreciate the details. If the app does well we'll be able to get the editor out more quickly so enjoy

http://24hourwallpaper.com/

-josh

Someone on these very forums pointed me in your direction last year. I'd made a post asking if it was possible to have a desktop that changed with the time of day and... turns out there was!

 

[chucker23n1]

Exactly. With things like this, ios 7, and Animojis, am I the only one sadly seeing the shark ready for jumping at the once great Apple Computer Co?

Yes. You’re literally the only person on the planet who sees that the once-great Apple Inc. who used to put a smiling Mac on the bolt screen, a pulsating sleep light on MacBooks and an illuminated logo on the back is now relegated to whimsical, pointless features like Animoji.

 

[goodwilldrums]

Does it also toggle your light/dark mode automatically?

No, but if you use F.Lux it will automatically put you in dark mode at night, and switch to light in the morning.
It's very nice.
[doublepost=1537981620][/doublepost]

This.

Use F.Lux instead of nightshift. There is an option to shift to dark theme at sunset.

 

[Websnapx2]

It does not.

I would love option to link Light/Dark mode setting to the Night shift schedule...

Try this out

https://nightowl.kramser.xyz

 

[Pahanda]

Anyone having problems with a second monitor? The image on my second screen is a random still of the sequence, never in par with the correct one on the laptops's desktop.

 

[bengi]

I used Sundial back in 90s with Mac OS 9 and then SereneSaver, lately MyLiveDesktop. This is a nice feature if only we could add our own desktop. Sundial used basic QT movies.