Atheria Help

Atheria turns your Mac desktop into living art: real-time Metal shaders, or your own video wallpapers. This guide walks through every feature. The "Pro" tag marks features unlocked by the one-time Atheria Pro purchase.

Getting started

Atheria lives in your menu bar by default, not the Dock. Look for the Atheria icon at the top-right of your screen. If you would rather it behaved like a normal app, Settings > System and Performance can move it to the Dock instead. Click it to open the menu, and choose Open Atheria to open the main window.

The main window has a sidebar: Wallpaper, Playlists, Smart Triggers, Generative Art, and Library, then a Create section holding Loop Creator, Shader Creator and Flame Creator, with Settings and Help at the bottom.

To set your first wallpaper, open Generative Art in the sidebar, browse the gallery, and click any piece. It applies to your desktop instantly.

Live shaders

Shaders are real-time generative art rendered live on your GPU. Because nothing is a video file, they never loop and never repeat.

• Browse: open Generative Art in the sidebar to see the gallery, grouped by category (Ambient, Fluid, Cosmic, Nature, Geometric, Cyber, Particle, Light, Fractal). Use the search box to filter by name.
• Apply: click a shader thumbnail to set it as your wallpaper.
• Customize: each shader has sliders for Speed, Density, and Variation, plus up to four Colors. Adjust them to make a shader your own.

The free version includes the Aurora shader. Atheria Pro unlocks the full library.Pro

Video wallpapers

You can use any of your own video files (mp4, mov, H.264, HEVC, ProRes) as a live wallpaper. Choose Select Video Wallpaper from the menu-bar menu, or import a video into your Library, then apply it.

Atheria plays the video on your desktop and loops it. Your files stay on your Mac and are never uploaded.

Video Editor Pro

The Video Editor prepares a video you choose into a clean, seamless wallpaper. It edits a video file, it does not record your screen.

• Trim: set start and end points to use just a segment of the clip.
• Rotate: fix a sideways clip.
• Boomerang loop: play the clip forward, then in reverse, for a seamless loop with no jarring jump back to the start.
• Optimize (HEVC): downscale large or 4K videos to your display's native resolution and re-encode to efficient H.265, which lowers CPU and energy use.

Open the editor from Video Editor in the sidebar, then pick a video file to begin.

Shader Creator Pro

Write your own real-time Metal shaders directly in Atheria, with no Xcode and no build step.

• Open Shaders in the sidebar and choose to create a custom shader.
• Write Metal Shading Language in the built-in editor, then Compile and Apply to see it live on your desktop. Compile errors point you to the line.
• Porting from the web? Paste a GLSL or Shadertoy shader and Atheria does a best-effort conversion to Metal to get you started.

Presence-aware effects Pro

Wallpapers can respond in real time to your cursor and how actively you are working. An intensity slider controls how calm or lively the reaction is. Turn it on in the wallpaper settings.

Privacy Guard

Privacy Guard frosts your screen into a clean privacy veil when you step away, then melts it away the instant you return. No lock screen, no password.

• On idle: the veil appears after an idle time you set.
• On demand: raise it instantly from any app with Command + Option + /, even if the idle veil is turned off. Move the mouse or press a key to dismiss it.
• Adjust: set the idle timer and blur strength in Settings > Privacy Guard.

Battery and performance

Atheria is built to be light on your Mac.

• Automatic pause: the moment a window fully covers your desktop (or you enter full screen), rendering drops to 0 fps, so Atheria does no work you cannot see. It resumes when the desktop is visible again.
• Power Saver: pause live wallpapers on low battery and in Low Power Mode. Toggle Pause on Low Power in Settings > Battery Saving.
• Frame rate: the free version renders up to 30 fps; Atheria Pro unlocks 60 fps.Pro
• Quality: Atheria measures how physically large each display is and how dense its pixels are, then renders at the resolution that display actually needs. A dense Retina screen hides a lower internal resolution completely, while a large TV shows it plainly, so the setting spends effort only where you would see it. Choose Battery, Normal, Extra or Maximum under System & Performance. Heavy wallpapers keep their frame rate budget at every setting.

Smart Triggers Pro

Change your wallpaper automatically based on context. Open Smart Triggers in the sidebar to set rules by:

• Time of day, using the broad phases of morning, afternoon, evening, and night, so your desktop shifts as the day goes on.
• Exact times, for a precise window such as 21:00 to 06:00. Windows that run past midnight work as you would expect.
• Power source, for a different look on battery versus plugged in.

Siri and the Shortcuts app

Atheria adds three actions to the Shortcuts app automatically. No setup is needed: install Atheria and they appear.

• Set Wallpaper applies one of your recent video wallpapers by name.
• Next Wallpaper advances to the next wallpaper in the active playlist.
• Set Playlist activates one of your playlists by name.

You can ask Siri directly, for example "Next Atheria wallpaper" or "Activate Atheria playlist", or combine the actions with any others in shortcuts you build yourself.

Tip: in the Shortcuts app, any shortcut can be given a keyboard shortcut of your choosing. Wrap Next Wallpaper in a shortcut and you have a system-wide next-wallpaper hotkey that never conflicts with your other apps.

Playlists

Build playlists that mix shaders and videos and rotate through them.

• Shuffle the order, or play in sequence.
• Set active hours so a playlist only runs during part of the day.
• Free playlists are limited to a couple of items; Pro removes the limit.Pro

Lock screen sync

Turn on Sync to Lock Screen in Settings > Lock Screen Sync to set a sharp still frame from your active wallpaper as the macOS desktop picture. Your lock screen mirrors it automatically.

Multiple displays

Flames cost more per display than other wallpapers, because each display grows its own from scratch. A flame on three displays does roughly three times the work of one, and your Mac may warm up. Atheria divides its quality budget between your displays automatically, so the setting means the same thing however many you have, but if you want the sharpest possible flame it is best on one display with a lighter wallpaper elsewhere.

Your wallpaper runs on every connected display, in the free version as well as Pro.

With Pro you can instead run a different wallpaper on each display. Connect a second display and Monitor Configuration appears on the Wallpaper screen.Pro

Atheria Pro

Atheria Pro is a one-time purchase, no subscription. It unlocks:

• The full shader library, not just Aurora
• The Shader Creator
• Presence-aware effects
• Playlists without the item limit
• A different wallpaper on every display
• Smart Triggers
• The Video Editor
• 60 fps rendering

To upgrade, choose Upgrade to Pro from the menu-bar menu, or tap any locked feature. Moving to a new Mac? Use Restore Purchases on the upgrade screen to re-apply your purchase.

Privacy

Atheria runs entirely on your Mac. It has no account, no servers, no analytics, and no tracking, and it collects no personal data. It does not use the microphone, camera, location, photo library, or screen recording. Optional wallpaper tagging analyzes a thumbnail on-device with Apple's Vision framework, and nothing leaves your device. See the full Privacy Policy.

Keyboard shortcuts

• Raise Privacy Guard: Command + Option + /

Other actions are available from the menu-bar menu (the Atheria icon), including switching wallpapers and managing playlists.

Troubleshooting

Atheria vanished and my wallpaper stopped

Open System Settings > Control Center > Allow in the Menu Bar and check that Atheria is switched on. macOS quits a menu-bar app when its icon is turned off there, and the wallpaper stops with it. The setting survives a restart, so Atheria will keep closing on launch until it is switched back on. Turn it on, open Atheria again, and everything returns, including your settings and your Pro unlock.

I do not see an app window

By default Atheria is a menu-bar app with no Dock icon. Click the Atheria icon at the top-right of your screen, then Open Atheria.

My wallpaper looks frozen or paused

That is by design when the desktop is fully covered by a window or you are in full screen, Atheria pauses to save battery. Reveal the desktop and it resumes. It also pauses on low battery if Pause on Low Power is on.

The menu bar colour does not match my wallpaper

macOS sets the menu bar’s appearance from the wallpaper picture chosen in System Settings > Wallpaper, shading it so the menu bar text stays legible. Atheria animates on top of that picture rather than replacing it, so the menu bar keeps reacting to the still image underneath, which is usually one you set a while ago and have not seen since.

To bring the two in line, turn on Lock screen sync in Atheria’s Settings. It saves a still of your current wallpaper as the system picture, so the menu bar picks up matching colours, and your lock screen matches too. Alternatively set the System Settings wallpaper to a plain dark colour, since Atheria covers it anyway.

If the menu bar instead looks like a flat solid panel rather than a tint, that is a different setting: System Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce transparency, switched off.

The shader editor scrollbar was hard to see

The editor now shows a visible scrollbar on the right edge. Scroll with your trackpad, mouse wheel, or the scrollbar.

I cannot find the scroll bar in a list

macOS hides scroll bars by default until you scroll. You can set them to always show in System Settings > Appearance > Show scroll bars.

Still stuck?

Email support@atheria.app with your Mac model and macOS version, and we will help.