Atheria

Changelog

Every release, dated and in plain language. What shipped, what got fixed, and what was measured along the way.

1.4.2

August 2026

Fixed: Atheria could fail to launch. If you had turned on Quiet While You Work and added an app, starting Atheria while that app was the one you were using could quit it immediately, before any window appeared. Because nothing opened, there was no way to reach Settings and switch the feature off. It arrived in 1.4.1, and this release exists to fix it.
Quiet While You Work can settle every display. The choice sits under Quiet While You Work: the display you are working on, which stays the default, or every display. Worth having if you keep a lively wallpaper on a second screen.
Fixed: the Shader Creator claimed a piece was live when it was not. It marked a shader as being on the desktop even while a video was the wallpaper. It now tells the two states apart and says which one you are looking at.
Fixed: Select All counted items instead of identifying them. Narrow the library with a search and it could read Deselect All while none of the items in front of you were selected. Deselecting now affects only what is shown, so a filtered view can no longer discard a selection you made outside it.
Fixed: a flame transform could be left with no way back. In the Flame Creator, dragging Color Speed down to zero hid the slider that sets it, so that transform lost its variation editing for good. Color Speed stays visible now, and rows are labelled Transform rather than guessing at Symmetry.
Clearer throughout. Fitting and Alignment is now Video Fitting and appears only when a video is the wallpaper, since every control in it applied to video alone. Activating an empty playlist is disabled with the reason shown rather than silently doing nothing, and a playlist that only rotates inside its active hours says so. The custom shader template no longer lists a live input that is always zero. Appearance Adjustments states plainly that some wallpapers do not read the palette. Automatic tags no longer describe a photo of a room as Cyberpunk.

1.4.1

August 2026

The wallpaper can get out of your way while you work. Pick the apps you want quiet around, in Settings under Quiet While You Work. While one of them is the app you are using, the wallpaper stops moving and dims, and comes straight back the moment you switch away. Only the display you are working on dims, so a second monitor keeps running normally, and the dim follows the window if you drag it to another screen. It behaves the same for generative art, flames and your own videos, and you choose how far it dims. Nothing happens until you add an app, and Atheria itself never quiets the wallpaper.
Fixed: a Smart Trigger set to an exact time could never fire. If another rule with the same priority also matched, the coarser one claimed the match and held it. An Evening rule would take over at the start of the evening, so an exact 18:30 window inside that evening never ran once. The more specific rule now wins when two share a priority, and a shorter time window beats a longer one containing it. An explicit priority still overrides everything, so rules already set up that way are unchanged. Reported by a user who diagnosed it himself.
Fixed: the Video Editor described things it does not do. The Optimize toggle only ever applied to Rotate, yet every export announced it had optimized the video, and Trim reported optimizing while it was not. The delete-original prompt claimed the file had been moved to your wallpapers folder even when it had not.
Corrected explanations throughout Settings and Help, including what Pause When Covered actually covers, which wallpapers the 30 fps cap applies to, and which section each battery setting lives in. Links to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy now point at atheria.app directly.

1.4

August 2026

Flames can breed. Pick two flames in the Flame Creator and press Breed. Atheria crosses them into a litter of six children, each one inheriting whole pieces of both parents: some transforms taken outright from one side, some blended, the camera mixed, and the colours taken whole from one parent or the other. The children are genuinely new flames rather than variations on a theme, and you can usually see which parent gave what. Open any child to keep working on it, or keep the ones you like. Breeding the same pair again gives a different litter every time, so a pairing you like is worth returning to.
Choose where Atheria lives. Settings, under System and Performance, now offers Menu Bar or Dock. Menu Bar is the default and unchanged. Dock runs Atheria as a normal app with a Dock icon and no menu bar item, and right-clicking that icon gives you the performance readout, Clear Wallpaper, and playlist controls. This exists because macOS quits a menu-bar app when you switch its icon off in Control Center, taking your wallpaper with it. Now you can turn the icon off from inside Atheria instead, and it keeps running.
A flame's motion controls now live in the Flame Creator. Speed and Drift moved under Camera and Motion, where you can see what they do while you change them, and they are separate from the generative art sliders now, so tuning a flame no longer changes your shaders and the reverse. They are settings for the flame engine rather than part of a flame, so they apply to whichever flame is running and are not saved into a flame or carried in a share code.
Flame rendering quality follows your Quality setting. There used to be a separate density slider that did almost nothing you could see on a flame while being the single biggest thing it cost to run. Battery now renders flames noticeably lighter and Normal slightly lighter, since the old slider defaulted to full. Extra and Maximum are unchanged from what they drew before.
Fixed: a flame preview could freeze on its last frame and never recover, while the desktop kept animating. It happened when one piece of the renderer failed to start and nothing tried again.
Fixed: the preview could also stop updating after an edit, or stick on the flame that was on the desktop before.

1.3.4

August 2026

Video wallpapers only stop when you step away if you are on battery. On mains power there is no reason to interrupt a video you can still see.
Fixed: Atheria could only ever ask for a rating after applying a generative art wallpaper, so people who use video wallpapers or the Flame Creator were never asked at all.

1.3.3

August 2026

Flames and generative art now render at the size your display actually needs. Atheria used to cap how large it drew the picture and then stretch that to fill the screen, so any display wider than about 3200 pixels looked soft: 4K TVs, 5K displays and ultrawides most of all. Atheria now measures how physically large each display is and how densely packed its pixels are, then renders at the size that display needs. Ultrawide screens gain the most, because the old cap punished width hardest.
Fixed: in flames, a smooth fade from light into dark could show visible steps rather than a clean gradient. It was most obvious on large screens.
A new Quality setting, in Settings under System and Performance, with Battery, Normal, Extra and Maximum. Normal is the recommended default. Extra and Maximum put what they have into detail rather than frames, so they run at 30 frames per second and say so on screen.
Flames now notice when your Mac is running warm and ease off. If you use more than one display, the work is shared out across them, so a quality setting asks about the same of your Mac whatever your display count. Each display used to ask for the full amount on its own.
Fixed: flames could drift backwards for a moment and then catch up.
Fixed: opening Mission Control or Expose paused your wallpaper. macOS draws them as a full screen window, which looked exactly like an app covering the desktop.
Fixed: the wallpaper jerked when the pointer reached the very top of the screen, at the menu bar.
A new Battery Saving section in Settings gathers everything that decides when Atheria does less. Stop When lets you choose how hidden the desktop has to be before wallpapers stop completely: completely covered, about 80% covered, or about half covered. Completely covered is the default, and the only one that never freezes a wallpaper you can still see. It matters most for video, which can be played or paused but never slowed.
Slow Down When Mostly Covered keeps generative art and flames moving gently, rather than running at full speed, once four fifths of the desktop is behind your windows.
Slow Down When You Step Away eases generative art and flames right down after five minutes with no typing or mouse movement. Video wallpapers stop too, but only on battery. Plugged in they keep playing, because a Mac driving a display has nothing to save. Everything picks up the moment you touch the keyboard or mouse.
Lower the Frame Rate on Battery caps wallpapers at 30 frames per second while you are unplugged. It is off unless you turn it on, because it is the one option here you might notice while looking at the wallpaper.
Target Frame Rate and Presence-Aware Desktop have moved into Settings. They govern flames as well as generative art, but they used to sit in the Generative Art tab, so there was no way to tell what they controlled. Target Frame Rate is now under System and Performance, and Presence-Aware Desktop has its own section. What they do has not changed, only where you find them. Pause When Covered and Pause on Low Power have moved into Battery Saving.
The Live Canvas Preview now shows your real display arrangement. One display shows that display's proportions; several are laid out the way you have them arranged in System Settings, with the menu bar marking your primary. It updates as you connect and disconnect screens.
The wallpaper gallery has a new Set Desktop By Default switch. Leave it on and clicking a wallpaper applies it straight away, which is how it has worked until now. Switch it off and clicking only changes the Live Canvas Preview, leaving your desktop alone until you press Set as Desktop Background.
Atheria now does considerably less work in the background. It no longer checks on a desktop nobody can see while your Mac is asleep or the screen is locked, and the previews inside the app stop when their window is not on screen.

1.3.2

July 2026

Fixed: your wallpaper could stop animating while it was still plainly in view. Atheria now measures how much of your desktop is actually showing and pauses only when the desktop is really covered. Large and external displays were affected most, and the same wrong reading also dimmed Presence-aware effects, as though the desktop were hidden.
Apps that tint or blur your whole screen no longer have to pause the wallpaper. macOS reports those overlays as solid windows, so a focus blur or a screen filter could pause your wallpaper while you could still see it through them. You now choose the exceptions in Settings, under System and Performance. Every other app still pauses the wallpaper as before.
You can also turn pausing off altogether. Switch off Pause When Covered in the same place and the wallpaper keeps running even when a window covers the desktop.
Smart Triggers can match an exact time window, not just morning, afternoon, evening and night. Pick a From and an Until time. Overnight windows such as 21:00 until 06:00 work, and Atheria says on screen when a rule carries over into the next day. Smart Triggers is part of Pro.
Fixed: pressing Edit on a Smart Trigger opened a blank form, and saving it wiped the rule you had set up.
Fixed: if you deleted a video that a Smart Trigger used, the rule was left with no video at all. The editor now shows the missing video by name.
Fixed: at startup Atheria assumed it was morning and that your Mac was plugged in, instead of checking the real time and whether you were on battery. The wrong rule could apply, so you saw one wallpaper appear and then get replaced a moment later.
Fixed: a time window that had already ended could still be applied, so an evening rule could take over at breakfast. Daily rules now come round once each day, instead of once each time you open Atheria.
Fixed: rearranging your displays, changing which one is primary, or changing a resolution could make a display forget the wallpaper you chose for it, and whether you had it set to Aspect Fill or Aspect Fit. Your choices now stay with the display itself.
Fixed: videos kept on a network share or a mounted disk image could be reported as missing by playlists and by Smart Triggers.
Atheria Help now covers a macOS setting that surprises people. If you switch Atheria off in System Settings, under Control Center, in the Allow in the Menu Bar list, macOS quits Atheria and your wallpaper stops. It stays off after a restart until you switch it back on.

1.3.1

July 2026

Your wallpaper now runs on every display, for everyone. Showing the same living wallpaper across all of your monitors is no longer part of Pro. Setting a different wallpaper on each display stays a Pro feature.
Try any wallpaper before you buy. Click a Pro wallpaper in the gallery and it runs live on your real desktop, across every display, then quietly returns to what you had. Upgrade while it is running and it simply stays.

1.3

July 2026

Fixed: Pro could drop back to free after restarting your Mac, forcing you to use Restore Purchases again. Your Pro unlock now survives a restart.
A new gem icon for the menu bar, and a Free Up Memory action that hands back cached video and shader memory whenever you want it.
The seven heaviest works from 1.1 now render at half scale with MetalFX upscaling: the same picture for noticeably less GPU.
Exporting a video loop no longer ties up the app, so the window stays responsive while the file is written.
Fixed: Striped Torus shimmered and strobed. Its stripes are anti-aliased now.
Fixed: Be Still showed a blue and black singularity at the core of its orb.

1.2

July 2026

A maintenance release: stability and performance refinements across the gallery and video playback, with no changes to how anything works.

1.1

July 2026

The Flame Creator is official. Grow fractal flames from archetypes or a blank canvas, mutate them step by step, and share any flame as a short text code. Part of Atheria Pro.
Seventeen new generative works join the gallery, every one license-vetted and ported to native Metal. The library now counts 85.
Fixed: video wallpapers played from the RAM cache could freeze at their loop point, especially 4K files. Playback now uses a sturdier path and recovers automatically if it ever stalls.
Fixed: two Flame Creator crashes: mutating a blank canvas, and pasting a malformed flame code.

1.0

July 28, 2026

Atheria launches on the Mac App Store. Living wallpapers for macOS: real-time generative art rendered on the GPU, and your own video loops.
Zero-Drain Occlusion Monitor: rendering stops entirely, a measured 0.0% CPU, the moment the desktop is fully covered.
Shader Creator: write Metal shaders in the app, or paste GLSL and let Atheria convert it.
Video Editor: trim, rotate, and boomerang any clip into a seamless wallpaper loop, with HEVC optimization.
Privacy Guard: a frosted veil over your screen on idle or instantly with a hotkey.
Playlists, Smart Triggers (time of day and power source), Siri Shortcuts, Lock Screen Sync, and multi-display support.
No account, no subscription, no data collected. One-time Pro purchase.

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