haze

Live wallpapers, a matching screensaver, and animated Metal gradients for macOS — native, lightweight, free.

Liquid‑Glass UI · sips resources · open source

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Haze turns videos, GIFs, images, and animated Metal gradients into your live desktop wallpaper and your idle screensaver — driven by one shared rendering core, with aggressive power management so it stays out of the way and off your fans.

The hero feature is the gradient engine: silky 2D gradients and Fluid 3D gradients (inspired by shadergradient.co) you can tune live — palette, speed, blur, grain — or pick from dozens of bundled presets.

Note

What “while sleeping” really means. When a Mac is truly asleep the display is off — there’s nothing to draw. Haze covers the two surfaces that actually exist: the live wallpaper (and the lock screen, which macOS derives from it) and the screensaver shown while the Mac is idle.

Screenshots

Features

• 🎞 Live wallpapers — looping video (H.264/HEVC, hardware‑decoded), animated GIFs, and stills.
• 🌈 Gradient engine — animated Classic (2D) and Fluid (3D) Metal gradients with an editable palette, speed, blur, and grain. Dozens of presets bundled.
• 💤 Matching screensaver — a real .saver plugin that reuses the same renderers, so your screensaver mirrors your live wallpaper automatically.
• 🖼 Match macOS wallpaper — optionally sets a still of your wallpaper as the system desktop picture, so Mission Control, the lock screen, and login match the live one.
• 🪶 Lightweight by design — pauses rendering when the desktop is fully covered, the display sleeps, the screen locks, or (optionally) on battery / Low Power Mode. Render resolution and frame rate are capped — ~0% CPU when occluded.
• 🧊 Native Liquid Glass UI — real Liquid Glass on macOS 26, graceful .ultraThinMaterial fallback on 15.
• ✨ Menu‑bar agent — no Dock clutter; switch wallpapers (grouped by category) or pause right from the menu bar.
• 🚀 Launch at login — optional, one toggle.
• 🔄 In‑app auto‑updates — checks daily (or on demand), shows the changelog, and installs in place (Sparkle, signed appcast).

Download

Grab the latest Haze.dmg from Releases, drag it to Applications, and launch. Builds are ad‑hoc signed, so on first open right‑click Haze.app → Open (or run xattr -cr /Applications/Haze.app) to get past Gatekeeper. After that, Haze keeps itself up to date automatically.

Requirements

• macOS 15.0+ (built and tested on macOS 26–27, Apple Silicon)
• Xcode 26 with the Metal Toolchain component
• XcodeGen — brew install xcodegen

# one‑time, if the Metal toolchain isn't installed:
xcodebuild -downloadComponent MetalToolchain

Build & run

make run          # generate the project, build, and launch
# or step by step:
make generate     # xcodegen → Haze.xcodeproj
make build        # debug build
make test         # run the HazeKit unit tests (56)
make release      # optimized build

Haze launches as a menu‑bar item (✨). Open the window from there, import media or pick a gradient, and click any tile to set it as your live wallpaper.

Installing the screensaver

In the app: Screensaver → Install, then Open Screen Saver Settings and choose HazeSaver. macOS owns the idle timer, so set the start delay there. The app bundles the .saver and copies it to ~/Library/Screen Savers/. Leave the screensaver on “Match wallpaper” and it follows whatever your live wallpaper is.

How it works

HazeKit (framework)            shared by the app + the screensaver
├─ Model        ContentItem · GradientConfig · ShaderGradientConfig · AppSettings
├─ Library      LibraryManager (import, thumbnails, JSON manifest)
├─ Render       WallpaperRenderer → Video · AnimatedImage · Gradient · ShaderGradient · Static
│               (CappedMTKView caps the drawable so smooth gradients sip GPU)
├─ Gradient     Metal shaders (fBm + domain warp · 3D fluid mesh) · presets
├─ Display      WallpaperWindow (desktop level) · DisplayManager (per‑screen)
├─ Power        PlaybackPolicy (pure, unit‑tested) · PowerMonitor (sleep/lock/battery/occlusion)
└─ Shared       ContentStore · JSONStore · Logger

Haze (app)                     LSUIElement menu‑bar agent + SwiftUI Liquid‑Glass UI
HazeSaver (.saver)             ScreenSaverView reusing HazeKit renderers

State lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Haze/ (manifest · media · settings). Both the app and the screensaver are non‑sandboxed and run as you, so no App Group is needed — the screensaver just reads the same files.

Resource discipline. PlaybackPolicy is a pure function of environment + preferences (fully unit‑tested). PowerMonitor feeds it from NSWorkspace sleep notifications, screen‑lock notifications, IOKit power‑source changes, and occlusion detection. When it says don’t render, every renderer pauses (video stops decoding, MTKView.isPaused = true) — zero GPU/decode work.

Roadmap

• Static login‑window background (admin‑only, OS‑restricted)
• Per‑display independent content
• GIF → HEVC transcode‑on‑import for lighter playback
• In‑app auto‑update (Sparkle) with signed appcast
• Notarized release (Developer ID) for a clean first‑open

Distribution notes

Haze is non‑sandboxed — desktop‑window placement and screensaver installation are incompatible with the App Store sandbox, which also makes it incompatible with the Mac App Store (and GPL‑3.0 is too). Local builds sign ad‑hoc; to share a build, set a DEVELOPMENT_TEAM, keep Hardened Runtime on, and notarize.

Contributing

Issues and PRs welcome. Keep changes focused, run make test before opening a PR, and match the existing style (small focused files, value types, no force‑unwraps).

License

GPL‑3.0 © 2026 Haze contributors. Free and open source.