Wallper 1.1: Battery-Aware Mode and the Display Manager

There is a real tension in putting a moving wallpaper on a laptop.

On a desk, plugged in, a live wallpaper costs you nothing you care about. On a train with 40% left, the arithmetic changes. Playing video behind your icons for the benefit of nobody, while you are trying to stretch the battery another two hours, is hard to defend.

Most apps hand that problem back to you. Remember to turn it off. Remember to turn it on again.

Wallper 1.1 answers it by noticing.

Battery-Aware Mode

Unplug your Mac and the wallpaper pauses. Plug it back in and it resumes.

That is the whole feature, and it works because it removes the decision rather than helping you make it. You are never trading a good-looking desktop against a workable battery, because the machine already knows which of those two situations it is in.

The wallpaper does not vanish when it pauses. The last frame stays on screen as a still image, so your desktop still looks like the thing you chose. It simply stops being video.

If you would rather keep motion running on battery, this is a setting rather than a rule. Battery-Aware Mode is the default because it suits most people most of the time, not because we think the choice should be ours.

For the broader question of what live wallpapers actually cost in battery terms, there is a full answer in will a live wallpaper drain my MacBook battery, and the measured numbers live in our real-world performance test.

The Display Manager

The other half of 1.1 is for people running more than one screen.

Multi-monitor setups are where wallpaper apps traditionally get embarrassing. Footage composed for a 16:10 laptop panel does not sit well on an ultrawide. A wallpaper that reads as calm on your main display can be distracting on a second screen sitting in your peripheral vision. A vertical monitor turns almost any landscape clip into a crop.

The Display Manager gives you per-monitor control:

• Scale, so footage is sized to the panel rather than stretched onto it.

• Position on the X and Y axes, so you decide which part of the frame survives when the aspect ratios disagree.

• Per-monitor disable, so a display can opt out entirely.

That last one turns out to be the most used of the three. Motion on the screen you are working on and a static image on the screen holding your reference material is a genuinely good setup, and until now there was no way to express it.

There is more on this in multi-monitor setup and different wallpapers per screen, and a deeper walkthrough on the displays support page.

Startup and Restore

The rest of 1.1 is unglamorous and worth having.

Wallpapers now load instantly when the app launches instead of appearing a beat later. They restore correctly after sleep and after login, which are precisely the two moments a wallpaper is most likely to quietly fail to come back.

We also fixed a rare startup hang that occurred when Wallper launched before the network was ready. It was an edge case, mostly on slow connections and mostly at login, and it made the app look frozen when it was really just waiting. It no longer waits.

The Point of All This

A live wallpaper is only pleasant if you never have to manage it.

The moment you are switching it off before a flight, nudging it back into position after plugging in a monitor, or wondering why it did not return after lunch, it has stopped being decoration and become a chore.

1.1 is mostly about deleting chores.