New icon, lots of lock screen love, and Quiet While You Work got a lot smarter. - New app icon! A glass icosahedron made for Liquid Glass, white in light mode and navy in dark mode. - Flame Journey: your lock screen now follows every flame on the journey. Atheria keeps a still of each flame ready, and does most of that work while your Mac is locked and plugged in. - Menu bar color: with "Show menu bar background" on, the menu bar now picks up the new colors right after each lock screen sync, instead of whenever macOS got around to it. - Quiet While You Work now fully stops the flame, and pauses your Flame Journey so it picks up right where it left off when you come back. Improvements - Smoother Flame Journey morphs, no more spinning, and each flame settles in without a snap at the end. - Sync Lock Screen Now updates right away, uses the flame you're actually looking at (even halfway through a morph), and always at the full resolution of your largest display. - Playlists wait while your Mac is locked or asleep, and pick up again when you're back. - New Help note with the best menu bar settings for Atheria. Fixed - Quiet While You Work could wake the flame for a moment when macOS briefly pops something up. - The lock screen could sync at the size of a Sidecar iPad instead of your Mac's display. - During a Flame Journey, Sync Lock Screen Now could set the wrong flame, or nothing until you locked your Mac. Appreciate all the feedback, keep it coming!

Atheria now speaks German and Japanese! The whole app, Help included, follows the language your Mac is set to. - The shader gallery opens instantly now. Every card shows right away, and the one under your pointer comes alive. - In a narrow window, rows of buttons wrap onto a second line instead of cutting off their labels. Appreciate all the feedback, keep it coming!

This is a big one! Most of 1.7 is about flames, starting with the new Advanced Flame Editor. - Advanced Flame Editor: A whole window for shaping your flame, drag the transforms around as triangles right on the live flame and tweak every value in the inspector. 409 variations to play with, each with a picture so you can see what it does before you add it, a gradient editor for the colors, and Back and Forward for when you go too far. - Open .flame files with just drag one onto the window. Export your flame as a PNG up to 8192 pixels, or back out as a .flame file. - Mutate shows you 8 mutations of your flame as pictures, open one or keep walking from it (Pro keeps the ones you love). - Listen to your flame! Every flame has its own sound, hear it in the editor or add it to a clip. - Clips can now journey from one flame to another. - Flame Gallery: All your flames in one place, the presets and My Flames. - Daily Colors: A new palette for your wallpaper every day, shades of one color or a mix of 2 or 3 that go together. Works for flames and shaders, each with their own setting. - Flame Journey (Pro): Your desktop drifts from flame to flame, morphing between them, anywhere from every minute to once a day, and your lock screen follows along. - Hide the shaders you never use, no more scrolling past them. Improvements - Every flame now renders with a kernel built just for its own variations, and at Extra quality flames can run at 60 fps (Pro). - Your lock screen picture now shows up on every desktop as you switch to it (you can turn this off in Settings). - Free exports have a small Atheria mark in the corner, Pro can turn it off. Fixed - Shader lock screens were a bit darker and bolder than the live wallpaper, they match now. Appreciate all the feedback, keep it coming!

NEW - Export Clip: the flame you are shaping, alive, as a short MP4 to post anywhere. 15, 30 or 60 seconds. Landscape, portrait or square. Standard or High quality. - Clips are rendered frame by frame at higher quality than the live wallpaper. You can close the window and keep working while one renders; your wallpaper slows down a little until it is done. - Clips and share cards are free to make. A free clip ends with a card naming the flame and Atheria; Pro can leave the card off. - Flame codes stay free to copy and paste. Pro keeps the flame on your desktop, and unlocks Save, Keep Archetype and Breed.

NEW - Flame codes are free to copy and paste. Copy Code and Paste Code no longer need Pro. Pro keeps the flame on your desktop. - The free preview stays on your desktop for a few minutes after you close the window, or until ten minutes pass without an edit. - When a preview ends, a small note says which flame went and offers Pro. - Keep mine: end a Gallery preview early and get your own wallpaper back. FIXED - The lock screen skipped a display that was showing a full-screen app. - Changing flames twice quickly could leave the lock screen on the first one. - A lock screen sync that did not finish now tries again. - A flame sent from an iPhone running a newer Atheria now asks you to update instead of doing nothing.

Fixed a bug where Privacy Guard used CPU in the background while you moved the mouse, even with wallpapers paused. Dismissing the privacy veil now returns you to the app you were using instead of leaving Atheria in front.

- Peach Web, a living flame wallpaper, is included free on every display. - Try the Flame Creator before you buy. Make a flame and watch it live on your desktop while you shape it. Keeping it is part of Pro. - 15 new flame variations, 27 in all. - A Back button in the Flame Creator, and pan sliders that now move straight up, down, left and right. - A flame code made in a newer version now asks you to update instead of drawing the wrong flame.

Fixed a bug where the Digital Rain glyphs on the lock screen did not match the desktop glyphs on some displays.

FIXED Digital Rain's characters were far too large and too spread out on a big display, and turning Density up made it worse rather than better. The characters are sized for the display they are on now, so a 5K screen gets a fine, dense field instead of a handful of oversized glyphs, and a laptop looks the way it always did. Density genuinely changes how big they are, across its whole range. Digital Rain's characters used to flick to a completely different symbol from one frame to the next, which read as a strobe rather than as falling code. They change more slowly now, and fade from one symbol to the next instead of cutting. The lock screen kept the first flame you set in a session and ignored every flame you loaded after it. It follows the flame you are actually looking at now. A flame could stutter while Atheria was preparing its lock screen image. It keeps moving smoothly through it now. CHANGED Flame lock screen images are rendered at your display's own resolution, rather than being scaled up from the smaller frame the live wallpaper draws. The filaments hold together where they used to go soft. When a flame stops for Power Saver or because one of your quiet apps is in front, it now settles into that same high-detail still instead of freezing on the animated frame. It is the picture standing still, not the animation paused. Waking it eases back into motion rather than snapping. Share Cards use the same sharper image. The list of apps you can exclude from pausing the wallpaper now offers only the apps actually covering your desktop, instead of everything running on your Mac.

FIXED The Live Canvas Preview could freeze on the last flame you made, and the only way back was switching tabs. That's sorted, it stays live now. Opening Settings for the first time after launch sometimes put the window behind whatever you were working in, so it looked like nothing had opened. It comes to the front now. That covers every way in: the menu bar icon, the Dock menu, Upgrade to Pro, Help, and the first-run welcome. CHANGED Atheria shows its version at the bottom of Settings, easier to quote if you ever get in touch. Help points at support@atheria.app now.

This update fixes a crash at launch, and that is the reason for it. FIXED Atheria could fail to start. If you had turned on Quiet While You Work and added an app, launching Atheria while that app was the app you were using could quit it immediately, before any window appeared. Because nothing opened, there was no way to reach Settings and turn the feature off. Fixed. NEW Quiet While You Work can now settle every display, not only the one you are working on. The choice sits under Quiet While You Work: the display I am working on, which stays the default, or every display. Worth having if you keep a lively wallpaper on a second screen. ALSO FIXED The Shader Creator showed a piece as live on the desktop even when a video was the wallpaper. It now tells the two states apart and says which you are looking at. Select All in the wallpaper library counted how many items were selected instead of which ones. Narrow the list 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. In the Flame Creator, dragging Color Speed down to zero hid the slider that sets it, leaving that transform with no way back to its variation settings. Color Speed stays visible, so the change is always reversible. Rows are also labelled Transform rather than being called Symmetry on a guess. Automatic tags no longer describe a photo of a room or a stone bridge as Cyberpunk. CLEARER Fitting and Alignment is now Video Fitting, and appears only when a video is the wallpaper. Every control in it applied to video alone, so it offered Aspect Fill on generative art that has nothing to fit. Activating an empty playlist did nothing, silently. It is now disabled with the reason shown. A playlist that only rotates inside its active hours says so, rather than stating a plain interval. The custom shader template listed a live input that is always zero, left out one that carries a real value, named its sliders differently from the editor, and offered a conversion that converted nothing. Appearance Adjustments now says plainly that some wallpapers do not read the palette, so the pickers have no effect on those.

The wallpaper can now get out of your way while you work. Pick the apps you want quiet around, in Settings under Quiet While You Work. While a selected app is active, 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 works 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 Smart Triggers: a rule set to an exact time never fired if another rule with the same priority also matched. A coarse rule like Evening would claim the match at the start of the evening and hold it, so an exact 18:30 window inside that evening never ran at all. The more specific rule now wins when two rules share a priority, and a shorter time window beats a longer one that contains it. Setting a higher priority still overrides everything, so rules you have already set up behave the way you set them. Clearer labels in the Video Editor. The Optimize setting now states plainly that it applies to Rotate, and the progress and completion messages describe exactly what each export did. Clearer explanations in Settings and Help, including what Pause When Covered covers, which wallpapers the 30 fps cap applies to, and where each battery setting lives. Links to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy now point at atheria.app directly.

Flames can breed. Press Breed and pick two flames. Atheria crosses them into a litter of six children, each 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. They 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. Breed the same pair again and you get a different litter, so a pairing worth returning to stays worth returning to. ALSO IN THIS RELEASE 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, and right-clicking its Dock icon gives you the performance readout, Clear Wallpaper and playlist controls. If you would rather not have Atheria in your menu bar, turn it off here rather than in Control Center, and your wallpaper keeps running. A flame's motion controls now live with the flame. Speed and Drift moved into the Flame Creator under Camera and Motion, and they are separate from the generative art sliders, so tuning a flame no longer changes your shaders or the reverse. Flame rendering quality follows your Quality setting. Battery renders flames noticeably lighter; every other tier is unchanged. FIXED A flame preview could freeze on its last frame and never recover while the desktop kept animating. The preview could stop updating after an edit, or stay on the flame that was on the desktop before.

The app could only ever ask for a rating after you applied a generative shader, so if you use video wallpapers or the Flame Creator it never asked at all. Fixed. It asks once per version but no more often than every 120 days, and dismissing it costs nothing. Ratings are most of how an app this size gets found, so if you leave one, thank you. Recently, in 1.3.3: - 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. Ultrawide screens gain the most, because the old cap punished width hardest. - 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. Slow Down When Mostly Covered keeps generative art and flames moving gently rather than running at full speed. Slow Down When You Step Away eases them right down after five minutes with no typing or mouse movement, and everything picks up the moment you touch the keyboard or mouse. - A new Quality setting, in Settings under System and Performance, with Battery, Normal, Extra and Maximum. Normal is the recommended default. - Flames now notice when your Mac is running warm and ease off. - 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: 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.

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. - New: a 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 capped at 30 fps. - 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. Battery Saving A new 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 plugged in 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. - Pause When Covered and Pause on Low Power have moved into this section from System and Performance. Also in this update - 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. - 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.

- 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: open "Apps That Never Pause the Wallpaper" in Settings, under System and Performance, and pick from your running apps. 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 (Pro) - Rules can match an exact time window now, 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. The Until time is when the rule stops, so a rule ending at 09:00 and one starting at 09:00 hand over cleanly. - Fixed: pressing Edit on a rule opened a blank form, and saving it wiped the rule you had set up. - Fixed: if you deleted a video that a rule 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. Also in this update - 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.

Your wallpaper now runs on all your displays, free. Tap any Pro shader to preview it live on your desktop before you decide. Plus stability improvements.

This update is all about polish, with a couple of fixes straight from user reports. - New menu bar icon: the Atheria gem now lives in your menu bar, and it adapts to light and dark modes like a native macOS icon. - Free Up Memory: a one-click action in the menu bar, right under the live memory readout. It releases the video and rendering caches on the spot, and playback resumes instantly. - Fixed: Pro could appear locked after restarting your Mac until you ran Restore Purchases. Your unlock now survives every reboot. Thanks for the reports. Keep them coming.

Minor improvements and bugs fixes: -Fixed a bug with the Loop Creator causing the app to become none responsive while processing the loop (but still recovering with the completed loop)

This update expands the gallery and polishes every corner. - Seventeen new generative wallpapers, each hand-ported to native Metal. The library now counts 85 living works across nine moods. - The Flame Creator takes center stage: grow fractal flames from eleven archetypes, a Chaos roll, or a blank canvas, mutate them step by step, and share any flame as a short text code. Part of Atheria Pro. - Heavy wallpapers now render more efficiently on 4K and 5K displays. - Fixed a rare freeze that could stop looping 4K video, plus several crash and rendering fixes across the app. Thanks for the feedback. Keep it coming.