Your desktop, lit by the sky outside.
Soft colour blobs drift behind your icons, drawn with an ordered dither, anywhere from a fine grain to big chunky pixels. The palette moves with the real sun at your location: day, golden hour, sunset glow, blue hour, moonlight, and back again.
Seven phases of light
Moonlight to midday, keyed to the sun's altitude and blended in OKLab so mixes stay vivid instead of turning grey.
No location prompt
Your rough position comes from the system time zone. Sunrise and sunset are calculated on your Mac.
Every display
Sits behind the desktop icons on each screen and rebuilds itself when monitors come and go.
Set and forget
Starts at login and keeps itself up to date. One light shader pass; pixel size and drift speed are yours to tune.
Install.
Download the app, unzip it and move Ditherglow to Applications. The sky starts right away, and the app lives in the menu bar as a small sparkle.
- Version
- 1.0, 2.3 MB
- Requires
- macOS 14 Sonoma or later
- Runs on
- Apple silicon and Intel
- Updates
- Built in, or check from the menu
Right-click Ditherglow in Applications and choose Open, once. Or clear the quarantine flag from Terminal:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Ditherglow.app# Clone and open the project
git clone https://github.com/mstrlc/ditherglow.git
open ditherglow/Ditherglow.xcodeproj
# Build and run the Ditherglow scheme;
# the sky starts behind your desktop icons.