Sync Hue and WLED Lights to Your Mac Screen
Your wallpaper's colors can now spill onto the lights in your room, your music can drive it from any app, and wallpapers can change themselves at sunset.
This is the biggest release Wallper has had, and the first one where the wallpaper stops being stuck on the screen.
Your music can drive it whatever you are playing it in. Your lights can follow its colors around the room. And wallpapers can group themselves into sets that change at sunset, so the gallery starts behaving like a playlist rather than a folder.
Quick answer: Light Sync reads the colors of your wallpaper as it plays and sends them to the lights in your room. WLED strips work over your Wi-Fi, Philips Hue works through your Hue Bridge, and a preview on screen lets you see the effect before you buy any lights at all.
Your Lights Follow Your Wallpaper
The surprise in this release is Light Sync. Whatever your wallpaper is doing, your lights do too, as it happens.
WLED strips work over your home Wi-Fi. Philips Hue works through your Hue Bridge, set up in Settings, and is newer so expect a rough edge or two. You can set how bright it gets and how gently it moves, so it feels like light in a room rather than a disco.
There is a preview on screen that shows exactly what your lights would be doing, which means you can try the whole idea without owning any. A slow ocean loop turning the room blue is one of those things a screenshot cannot sell you, so look at it and then decide.
If you want something to try it with:
Music From Anything You Play
Music wallpapers started out understanding Apple Music and Spotify. Now they understand everything.
Play something in YouTube Music, YouTube in a browser, SoundCloud or anything else that makes sound on your Mac, and your wallpaper follows it, cover art and playback buttons included, on the desktop and the lock screen both.
You decide which apps are allowed to do that, from a list in Settings that only shows software you actually have.
Wallpapers That Change at Sunset
You can group wallpapers into your own sets now, and split a set into Day and Night halves that swap over as the day does. Pick a set as your rotation and shuffle works through that instead of everything you own.
Something bright while you are working and something darker after sunset is the obvious use, and it turns out to be what most desks quietly wanted. The automatic rotation FAQ covers the scheduling.
Lock Screen Wallpapers Appear Faster
Getting a wallpaper ready for the lock screen used to happen on your own Mac, every time, on every machine. Now it is done once, centrally, and most of the time your Mac just receives the finished thing.
The first person to put a given wallpaper on their lock screen waits. Everyone after them does not.
An Account, and a Licence for Five Macs
Accounts arrived in 1.8. Sign in with a code sent to your email, and your licence lives in one place instead of being tied to whichever Mac you first activated it on.
There is also a new Pro+ licence covering up to five Macs, with your wallpaper choices following you between them. The app lists every Mac using your licence so you can free one up in a click, and the new MacBook Neo is supported. Tiers are on the pricing page.
Multi-Display, Offline and Reliability Fixes
This is the longest list of fixes Wallper has shipped, and most of it is about the moments when your Mac changes shape around the wallpaper.
Change a display's resolution, scaling or arrangement and the wallpaper resizes at once instead of waiting for you to unplug something. Each screen gets its own wallpaper back when you start up, even after a restart with no internet. A fullscreen video on one display now pauses the wallpaper on that display only, instead of all of them.
Being offline behaves properly too. The app opens in seconds even when it cannot reach us, your library is there from the start and fills in when you are back, and a banner tells you when it will next try instead of leaving you guessing. A failed download now says so, with a button to try again.
And for anyone who wonders: everything the app sends to us is encrypted the whole way.
Related
Light Sync is a beta in Wallper 1.8 and later. Try Wallper free for 7 days and open the preview before connecting any lights.
