Atheria - Your desktop comes alive. And knows when to disappear.

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Atheria turns your Mac desktop into living art you can grow yourself. Its Flame Creator generates fractal flames you shape, save, and share as a code. Every flame is one of a kind: there are more possible flames than atoms in the observable universe. It's also a full wallpaper engine: real-time custom shaders, a library of 85, and your own video loops that drop to 0 fps the moment they're hidden. macOS 15+, Apple Silicon and Intel. One-time Pro, no subscription, nothing ever leaves your Mac.

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Hi Product Hunt, Ben here, solo dev behind Atheria. I built Atheria because every live wallpaper app I tried was the same thing: a catalog of looping videos quietly eating my battery. I wanted living art that is computed, not replayed, and an app polite enough to vanish the moment you cannot see it. So Atheria renders generative art in real time on the GPU, and when a window fully covers your desktop it stops rendering entirely. Measured with Activity Monitor: about 3% of one core while animating, and 0.0% when hidden. The methodology is a footnote on the site, not a marketing rounding trick. The parts I am proudest of: - Shader Creator: write Metal shaders inside the app, or paste GLSL and let it convert. No Xcode, no build step. - Video Editor: trim, rotate, and boomerang any clip of yours into a seamless loop. - Privacy Guard: one hotkey frosts your whole screen when you step away. - No accounts, no servers, no analytics. The privacy label is empty because there is nothing to collect. Free to try with a full-quality shader, no watermark, no time limit. Pro is a one-time purchase, priced lower for launch week. The real shaders run live in your browser if you want proof before downloading anything: embraarchive.com/atheria-live.html I will be here all day. Ask me anything, especially the hard performance questions.

Love the idea of generating flames as shareable code, that part is genuinely cool. One thing I'd love to see is the ability to set a flame as your wallpaper directly and have it slowly evolve over time, like a screensaver mode that drifts through parameters instead of staying static. Would make it feel even more alive.

 thanks for the idea, I’ll keep this in mind for a future update.

 Hi, currently the flames do live on your wallpaper and actively do their thing, but they don't evolve from their current morph. It's something I will look into. The next feature will be breeding the flames, creating a litter with the combined genomes.