Get Free Animated Wallpapers For Mac - Mach Desktop free moving wallpapers for desktop. Spira - Once upon a time it was a world of prosperity, sustained by an advanced civilization of machina. Then, one thousand years ago, Sin came. This immortal menace brought perennial destruction to the land and slowed advances to civilization.
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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.
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 â especially if you want to do a fixed view of the same place at different times in the day â 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 â 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 â 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 â 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.
A few weeks ago, we showed you how easy it is to set up a Live Photo or animated GIF as wallpaper on an iPhone. In todayâs Quick Tip, youâll learn how to bring some of that animated fun to your Mac in the form of a screen saver.
Now if you think your screen saver is going to be Retina Display-worthy eye candy, you can lower your expectations; itâs going to be a little more low-resolution. This is a really fun way to display your favorite family Live Photo when your Macâs screen saver kicks in, and perfect for annoying or amusing co-workers with the latest internet meme.
Setting a GIF as a Mac Screen Saver
Come on now, who hasnât wanted to have the classic 2011 meme ânyancatâ as a screen saver? After a quick trip to the universal repository of all things GIF â Giphy.com â I was able to locate the original âcat with a pop-tart bodyâ nyancat GIF and download it to my Mac. You can see this classic in all of its animated pixelated glory above.
It can sometimes be difficult to download a GIF as a GIF file â particularly on Giphy! The GIF service has many ways to download files, usually as MP4 movie files. If you run into the issue of not being able to download your GIF as a GIF file, do a search for the meme using Google or your favorite search engine, then right-click on the GIF displayed and select âDownload Image asâ¦â.
Easy-peasy, right? Now comes the hard work.
1)Download the Animated GIF Screensaver from Github.
2) Open your Downloads folder (or whatever folder you have set to save downloads from your browser), right-click the file and select Open
3) Youâll see the following warning dialog:
(Youâll be warned that the screensaver file is from an unidentified developer. Click Open.)
4) As noted in the screenshot above, click Open to open the file. Next, youâll be asked if you wish to install the file for the current user only or for all users. If youâre the only user of the Mac, go ahead and select âInstall for all users of this computerâ (see screenshot below), then click Install.
(Choose whether the screensaver is installed for you or all users of the Mac.)
5) At this point youâre asked to enter your administrative password, since youâre making a change to the operating system. When the installation is complete, open System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver, then click on the Screen Saver tab (see screenshot below):
(Click on the AnimatedGIF Screen Saver to select it.)
6) Now we need to select the GIF to use as our screen saver. Click on Screen Saver Options, and this dialog appears (see screenshot below):
(Click âSelect File or Directoryâ to choose your GIF or directory of GIFs).
7) This dialog allows you to set the animation rate of your GIF, set a background color, and even fill a directory with GIFs that the screen saver will randomly display at a pre-set interval. Choose the individual file or directory, then click OK. I find that previewing the screen saver provides a good check on whether or not a particular GIF was a good choice. Hereâs what nyancat looks like on my MacBook Pro (see photo below):
(Behold the awesomeness that is nyancat on a MacBook Pro!)
Iâm sure youâre extremely impressed, perhaps a bit jealous of this incredible animated screen saver. Thatâs should be your inspiration to go out and turn your favorite internet meme into an animated screen saver.
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Converting a Live Photo to a GIF for use as a Mac Screen Saver
The following instructions detail how to turn a Live Photo from your favorite iOS device into a GIF that can be used with the Animated GIF Screensaver. These are shamefully copied directly from our previous post on using a Live Photo or GIF as iOS wallpaper:
1) Launch the Photos app
2) Tap on the Live Photo you wish to convert to a GIF
3) Swipe up on the center of the screen to view animation effects. For GIFs, itâs best to use the Loop effect, which plays the Live Photo over and over again. Thereâs also a Bounce effect, which works like Instagramâs Boomerang. The other effect, Long Exposure, merely turns all of the individual frames of the Live Photo and puts them into one image, so itâs not appropriate for GIF creation.
4) Once youâve changed the image into a Loop, the word âLoopâ appears in the upper part of the Photos app screen and youâll see the image looping over and over.
5) Tapping that Loop button actually did the trick! To find your GIF, tap on Albums in the Photo app, then find the Animated album. Your file is looping away in there, and with a tap on the Share button you can send it via Messages, Mail or your favorite social network. Note that if you use AirDrop to share the file, it is actually sent as a .MOV movie file.
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