I also tried the same with Wallpaper appexes, the reversing seemed easy enough, but WallpaperAgent refused to load them, so I still use the classic trick of using my own window with a video player on top of the wallpaper, and below the icons.

I will have a look and check what I missed.

And I wasn't even using video wallpapers at the time.

Just discovered I had no internet 3 days into the month as my ISP had cut me off. Had to dig deep and spend hours I'll never get back trying to find out where all the data was going.

Here's a thread I just found now that shows others having similar issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1ii38g8/macbook_wall...

This was literally my first hack I did in high school in 2005. Doing something I’d never seen done before, a video wallpaper.

Step one, grab a handle to the video memory serving the wall paper. My “game trainer cheats” experience served me well. That was easy.

I had to figure out the hard way that per pixel calculations are extremely CPU taxing, the YUV to RGB video color space conversion. With a pirated Intel compiler I could get the naive blit into memory videy background working.

But then I wondered how other video apps were working so efficiently?

They used a GPU overlay! How it worked is you’d designate a color on your screen as the overlay color, and, when the screen was rendered, any pixel that was the overlay color was swapped with the full screen rendered video. I forget the specifics, it was some directX api. So, set the wallpaper to the hottest hot pink, run the renderer, and bobs your uncle, video wallpaper.

Everyone I showed this to was amazed, I really though I was on to something! Trouble was, I couldn’t get the damn thing to run on other people’s computers!

Little did I know or understand about the dreaded VCruntime redistributable. It wasn’t until 10 years later when I started working in industry I learned about “software distribution”. Linux makes it too easy, windows makes it too hard, static linking everything that isn’t network facing is probably the right approach.

I was so annoyed when Vista had the video wallpaper feature. “Man I was doing this years ago!”.

https://kagerou.glass/phosphene/

https://kagerou.glass

On a similar note, I’d love to replace Aerials on tvOS with my own videos. I have yet to figure out how to craft a working data feed that the tvOS will accept using the secret mode that I believe is used in the retail store displays.

Out of curiosity: how much did you need to steer Claude while working on this project, and how long did it have?

Asking partly because I see "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>", and partly because I keep hearing "so what do you do with all these agents", and this is a good example of what people do with all these agents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45247396

However, it may definitely get broken by Apple, as you note.