UnfoldMyMac for macOS
Lid Effects that follow your MacBook. Dynamic Wallpapers that react to your work. Creative Scenes that respond to your world. All in one native Mac app.
macOS 26+ · Open source · Made by Matterward LabsDrag or swipe down to close. Up to open.Use ↑ ↓ to move. Home / End for limits.
F1-inspired wallpaper · Sample session counters
Choose a cover. It closes fully at 30°.
Native wallpaper recordings with sample data. Lid movement and covers are an interactive illustration.
A new home for the whole collection. Find a design by category, tag, creator, or the things it reacts to. Take a closer look before bringing it to your desktop.
Every wallpaper and creative scene has a page of its own: the real design preview, a full description, features, and linked creator credits.
Brand marks and feature badges show what’s involved—Claude, Codex, a public API, your lid sensor, or an optional microphone. Preview, apply, and customize from below the main preview.
Browse in a grid or list. Keep your place with a title that stays in the toolbar as you scroll. Switch between light and dark, just like the rest of your Mac.
Close a little and the effect moves a little. Open back up and it reverses. On a MacBook with a readable lid-angle sensor, the position of the lid controls how far the effect has progressed.
How lid control worksOpen Lid Effects, choose a design, and scrub through its preview. Try the curtains halfway closed, or see where a character first peeks into view.
Choose where the effect starts and where it finishes. Adjust the range until the movement feels right for the way you close your Mac.
Effects start disabled. Enable your choice from the app; the overlay lets clicks through, and the menu-bar controls stay within reach.
Filmed at a café. Close the lid, change the scene.
See the effects and wallpapers out in the world.
02:30 · Sound onA Mac app with animations that follow your lid and live wallpapers for your desktop. See where it started, choose a look, then watch it on a real MacBook.
The full film plays the complete recordings at 1.5×. Individual clips play at their original speed. Press play for sound; the films stream from YouTube in 4K, with HDR on compatible screens.
All 13 lid effects and 20 dynamic wallpapers, plus Hinge Garden and The Workshop in Creative Scenes. Find your desktop personality.
Velvet folds and stage lighting. A curtain call for your tabs.
App render · Demo desktopChoose a design. Where a recording is available, press Preview to play. Wallpapers and Creative Scenes show representative data.
Curtains, curious faces, and a little moonlit escape.
Choose what happens when your lid comes down.
A sculpture moves with your Mac’s workload. A robot follows your coding sessions. Your GitHub profile becomes a city.
Twenty wallpapers, including ten game worlds with useful live features. Track your battery with Wolverine, focus at a Site of Grace, or follow the wind through Tsushima.
Meet your next wallpaperA little robot responds to working, waiting, and completed hook states.
App render · Sample dataTen live wallpapers for gamers, on Mac. Charge up with Wolverine, focus at a Site of Grace, and let Night City follow your downloads.
Explore the wallpapers
On macOS 26, UnfoldMyMac is a wallpaper provider. Every bundled Dynamic Wallpaper and Creative Scene appears in System Settings under Wallpaper and Screen Saver, each with a rendered thumbnail, in the same panes as Apple’s own.
Choose a scene under Screen Saver and it plays on your lock screen: the same Metal scene, the same live readouts while the app is running, at up to 60 fps. Lid, sound, and pointer reactions stay with the app’s own desktop window. The app shows whether a scene is on your desktop only or on your desktop and lock screen, and Add to Lock Screen… in the menu bar opens the right pane.
How the lock screen works
Drag down to close the lid, or up to open. Use arrow keys when focused. Charger controls are below.
Eight open apps. Eighteen parcels. A little room to work.
Native scene renders with sample inputs. Your device isn’t read.
A tiny maker’s studio opens with your Mac. Open apps light the benches; items in a folder you choose become parcels. Gentle motion and rotating lines keep you company.
Explore design →The Workshop turns your everyday Mac into a tiny maker’s studio. Open the lid and a wooden case unfolds, task lamps rise, and a little wind-up maker gets to work.
Your open apps light the benches. Connect your Desktop, or another folder you choose, and its items become parcels on the shelves. Up to twelve stations and twenty-four parcels appear; the optional caption keeps the full counts.
Small tools move gently, daylight warms the room, and connecting your charger sends a glow around the brass rail. Eight motivating lines fade into one another every forty-five seconds.
Customize the lines, counts, pointer parallax, and mirrored view. Folder access is optional, and files are counted without opening their contents. Reduce Motion holds a complete, still workshop.
Created by Matterward Labs. Native app render with sample counts and optional text hidden.
See The Workshop
Drag down to close the lid, or up to open. Use arrow keys when focused. Charger controls are below.
Unplugged, the garden settles into a quieter glow.
Native scene renders with sample inputs. Your device isn’t read.
A glass snail tends a tiny greenhouse. Lid movement, charger power, and optional sound bring the garden to life.
Explore design →Meet Hinge Garden, a glass snail tending a miniature greenhouse. Another little world in Creative Scenes, shaped by your Mac.
Open the lid and the garden wakes. Close it and the snail retreats. Connect your charger and a pulse travels through the water and roots, up the shell, and into the greenhouse lantern; a gentle glow remains while power is connected.
Battery, daylight, and system activity shape the atmosphere. Enable pointer response, supported motion sensors, or microphone input in Customize. A breath can stir petals and pollen. Sound and motion sensing are optional; microphone processing stays on your Mac.
Optional one-liners add a quiet thought to the scene. Reduce Motion keeps the garden still.
Created by Matterward Labs. App render with representative inputs.
See Hinge GardenA coding session can change a character’s mood. A public forecast can change the sky. The engine feeds those inputs to the wallpaper’s motion, colours, and text.
Codex Mission Control follows lifecycle hooks: starting work, using tools, asking for approval, finishing a turn, or being interrupted. The robot’s expression and status follow along.
| Codex event | Wallpaper state |
|---|---|
| Submit a prompt or run a tool | Working |
| Request permission | Needs you |
| Complete a turn | Finished |
| Interrupt the turn | Interrupted |
The active feed reads local hook records once a second. Records keep event metadata and counters; prompts, commands, and responses are discarded.
Set up Codex hooksPlanetary Kp readings and the aurora forecast shape the curtains around Earth. The data comes from NOAA’s public space-weather feeds.
Public repository and follower counts, plus recent public push events, give your profile a place in the city. Connect a username in the app.
Both sources refresh every five minutes. GitHub can delay public events, so these are periodically updated stats. See GitHub’s timing notes.
Connect another data sourceA small adapter can turn a public API response into the engine’s JSON snapshot format. Supply an updating local file or an HTTPS snapshot endpoint, then bind its values to your template. A raw API URL needs that translation unless it already returns the snapshot format.
Local snapshot files are read once a second; the standard HTTPS connector polls every five seconds. Your adapter controls upstream refreshes and API rate limits.
UnfoldMyMac is written in Swift 6 for macOS 26 and later. SwiftUI handles the interface, AppKit places the desktop windows, and Metal renders dynamic wallpapers, creative scenes, and lid effects on the GPU. On macOS 26, a sandboxed wallpaper extension hosted by macOS runs the same Metal pipeline for the desktop and lock screen. The scene keeps going with the app closed. While macOS shows it, the app stops drawing its own copy.
Metal scenes use one GPU device and command queue. Shader libraries and render pipelines are cached across the app, so changing a scene can reuse work already done. The renderer prefers precompiled shaders when they’re available.
The wallpaper renderer uses Apple’s CAMetalDisplayLink to schedule frames for presentation. Choose a 30 or 60 fps limit; macOS power and accessibility settings can lower it automatically.
Most wallpaper scenes cap rendering at 1,920 pixels on the longest edge. Hinge Garden uses native display resolution for its fine geometry. Each Metal surface allows at most three frames in flight, keeping queued GPU work bounded.
| Mac state | Frame limit |
|---|---|
| Normal playbackYour choice in settings | 30 or 60fps |
| Low Power ModeAlso during serious or critical thermal pressure | 30fps maximum |
| Reduce MotionContinuous animation is still | 1update / second |
| Mac or display asleepRendering and data sampling stop | Paused |
Playback also pauses when you switch to another user’s session.
Frost uses ScreenCaptureKit to receive desktop frames in memory. Core Video exposes those frames as Metal textures without copying the pixels. Screen Recording permission is needed for Frost; the other lid effects work without it.
Read the rendering code, the wallpaper playback policy, or Apple’s Metal overview.
UnfoldMyMac is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The Swift app, its Metal shaders, and this website live in one public repository. Read the code, report a bug, or build a scene with the extension guide.
The renderer, data connections, and template format are in place. Now I want to see the scenes other people would put on their desktops.
Try a harbour that follows the tide, a greenhouse driven by weather data, or a character with its own reaction when Codex finishes a turn. These are ideas to build on.
Pitch something stranger, too. Share a sketch, the data it would use, and what should move. A rough drawing is enough to start a conversation.
Use an installed scene and change its colours, text layers, or data bindings in JSON. Import the template to try it on your Mac.
Contribute a template folder with its own Metal shader to the repo. The engine supplies timing, data, and display handling.
Write an adapter or a native provider for another data source. Include sample data so people can try the scene before connecting it.
Implementation and setup details are in the wallpaper engine guide. Start with an idea in the issue tracker, or send a pull request with a working scene.
Lid control needs a readable angle sensor, and support varies by MacBook model. The app requires macOS 26 or later. Check the requirements before installing.
Lid effects stay on the MacBook’s built-in display. The app applies a Dynamic Wallpaper or Creative Scene to your primary display, and other displays keep the wallpaper you chose for them. On macOS 26, System Settings › Wallpaper lets you assign a scene to any display.
Yes, on macOS 26. Choose a scene under System Settings › Screen Saver and macOS plays it on the lock screen, with live readouts while the app is running. How the lock screen works.
Import an image and try the Sculpted, Diagonal, Slide, or Burst reveal. The app keeps a local copy. You can also build a wallpaper template using the extension guide.
Give it a curtain call. Or a very small robot.
