DotStudio

Living screensavers and wallpaper for your Mac: generative scenes, real clocks,
live skies, and the song you're playing on top.
dotstudio.davidlam.online · Download

Pick from the gallery or build your own in a live editor. DotStudio installs one screensaver, then everything — which style plays, at night, in rotation, behind your windows — happens in the app. Native, local, free.

Features

• Scenes and Looks. Scenes paint themselves — Liquid Chrome, Topography, Zen Garden, a 3D solar system, a black hole. Looks restyle your own photos and video (or the built-in public-domain slideshow): film, riso, cyanotype, dithers, ASCII, CRT.
• Clocks. StandBy, Minimal and Chronometer are new in 1.4.2, alongside Flip Clock, Word Clock and Window Light.
• Bounce. A logo drifts corner to corner, changing colour on every bounce, and every couple of minutes lands exactly in a corner. Use the DotStudio mark, a word, or your own logo.
• Live skies. Tidewater follows the real sun and moon; the sea scenes follow your local weather — cloud, rain, storms, fog and snow.
• What's playing. Spotify or Apple Music over any screensaver — in a corner, or full screen in Album, Stage or Cover layouts over the album's living art.
• Live wallpaper with SYNC. Any style behind your windows, or press SYNC and the desktop plays the screensaver's scene in step, so the screensaver starts right where your desktop was.
• Playlist and Night. One style, a rotation, and another look after your real sunset.
• In the menu bar. Music, wallpaper and styles without opening a window.
• Instant start. The screensaver is up the moment your Mac goes idle.
• Efficient. Every scene draws with its own GPU pipeline; the wallpaper pauses when windows cover it, and frame rate caps on battery. 120 fps on ProMotion displays, when you want it.
• Updates itself. New versions arrive from GitHub Releases and install when you quit.
• Private. Your library stays on your Mac. Weather is fetched for your approximate location, rounded to about 10 km. When a player doesn't hand over a cover, DotStudio looks it up in Spotify's or Apple's public catalog — only the song's ID, or its artist and album, is sent.

Gallery

Every frame here is rendered by the app.

Liquid Chrome	Topography	Universe
Zen Garden	Tidewater	Aurora
Black Hole	StandBy	Chronometer
Minimal	Bounce	Word Clock

What's playing

Full Screen · Album	Corner · over Topography

_{Demo track and artwork.}

The editor

Double-click any tile. A big live preview beside every dial — angle, speed, colour, frame rate. Stack effects on top of a scene, or start from nothing with Create Your Own.

Install

1. Download DotStudio.dmg from the latest release and drag DotStudio into Applications.
2. Open it once. DotStudio isn't notarized yet, so macOS stops the first launch: go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway.
3. Follow the welcome guide. It installs the screensaver, then shows you where to choose it in Wallpaper → Screen Saver. After that, you switch styles inside the app.

Updates are automatic: DotStudio checks GitHub Releases, downloads new versions in the background and installs them when you quit (or Settings → Updates → Restart to Update). The screensaver updates along with the app. Releases are signed with a stable identity, so privacy permissions (like Automation for Spotify and Music) survive updates.

Requires macOS 14 or later. Made and tested on Apple Silicon.

Build from source

Needs Xcode 26 or later (the app uses the macOS 26 SDK) and XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen
git clone https://github.com/dw2lam/DotStudio.git && cd DotStudio
xcodegen generate
xcodebuild -project DotStudio.xcodeproj -scheme DotStudio -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath build build
open build/Build/Products/Release

If the first build asks for the Metal toolchain: xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain.

How it works

• One screensaver. The app embeds a single universal DotStudio.saver. It reads the shared library in ~/Library/Application Support/DotStudio (read-only, from the sandboxed screensaver host) and plays whatever the library says. The app writes the library, plus the music and weather state the screensaver shows. Switching styles never touches System Settings.
• A pipeline per scene. Each scene is compiled into its own Metal pipeline, and after an install or update the app precompiles them for your Mac into a pipeline archive, so the screensaver draws its first frame almost immediately.
• Wallpaper. Desktop-level windows paced to the display. They stop drawing entirely while covered, locked, asleep or under the screensaver, and hold still when the Mac runs hot.

Development

Headless tools — nothing is shown on screen, and each one runs against a throwaway store (DOTSTUDIO_STORE_DIR=$(mktemp -d)), never your real library.

Tool	What it does
tools/gallery/render.sh <dir> --only "Aurora" --size 1280x800	Renders the default styles to PNGs (--clock, --weather, --logo, music flags; see main.swift)
tools/perf/run.sh renderer|saver|wallpaper|idle	CPU, allocation, file-system and wake-up costs of the render loops
tools/startup/run.sh	Time to first frame, cold and warm
tools/music-selftest/run.sh	End-to-end music detection, driven by synthetic player notifications
tools/icon/build.sh <dir>	Regenerates the app icon from the renderer
DOTSTUDIO_UI_SHOTS=<dir> on the app binary	Off-screen renders of every app screen (DOTSTUDIO_UI_ONLY, _SIZES, _APPEARANCE; see App/Shots.swift)

Release history is in CHANGELOG.md. Tagging v* builds, signs and publishes a release with its Sparkle appcast (.github/workflows/release.yml).

Credits

Built with SwiftUI and Metal. Updates by Sparkle.

• Weather: Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, licensed CC BY 4.0.
• Earth and planet maps in Universe: Solar System Scope, licensed CC BY 4.0.
• Built-in slideshow photos: CC0 and public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — see Shared/Photos/CREDITS.md.
• The Looks were inspired by grain.rad and ditherit.com.