Dark Mode is one of the most popular additions to macOS — especially among us developer types, who tend towards light-on-dark color themes in text editors and appreciate this new visual consistency across the system. A couple of years back, there was similar fanfare for Night Shift, which helped to reduce eye strain from hacking late into the night (or early in the morning, as it were). If you triangulate from those two macOS features, you get Dynamic Desktops, also new in Mojave. Now when you go to “System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver”, you have the option to select a “Dynamic” desktop picture that changes throughout the day, based on your location. The result is subtle and delightful.

Having a background that tracks the passage of time makes the desktop feel alive; in tune with the natural world. (If nothing else, it makes for a lovely visual effect when switching dark mode on and off) But how does it work, exactly? That’s the question for this week’s NSHipster article. The answer involves a deep dive into image formats, a little bit of reverse-engineering and even some spherical trigonometry. The first step to understanding how Dynamic Desktop works is to get hold of a dynamic image. If you’re running macOS Mojave open Finder, select “Go > Go to Folder” ( ⇧ ⌘ G), and enter “/Library/Desktop Pictures/”.

In this directory, you should find a file named “Mojave.heic”. Double-click it to open it in Preview. In Preview, the sidebar shows a list of thumbnails numbered 1 through 16, each showing a different view of the desert scene. If we select “Tools > Show Inspector” ( ⌘ I), we get some general information about what we’re looking at: Unfortunately, that’s about all Preview gives us (at least at the time of writing). If we click on the next panel over, “More Info Inspector”, we don’t learn a whole lot more about our subject: Color Model RGB Depth: 8 Pixel Height 2,880 Pixel Width 5,120 Profile Name Display P3 The.heic file extension corresponds to image containers encoded using the HEIF, or High-Efficiency Image File Format (which is itself based on HEVC, or High-Efficiency Video Compression — also known as H.265 video). For more information, check out If we want to learn more, we’ll need to roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty with some low-level APIs. Digging Deeper with CoreGraphics Let’s start our investigation by creating a new Xcode Playground.

For simplicity, we can hard-code a URL to the “Mojave.heic” file on our system. Import Foundation import CoreLocation // Apple Park, Cupertino, CA let location = CLLocation ( latitude: 37.3327, longitude: - 122.0053 ) let time = Date () let position = solarPosition ( for: location, at: time ) let formattedDate = DateFormatter. LocalizedString ( from: time, dateStyle:. Medium, timeStyle:. How to combine 4 pdf files into one for mac. Short ) print ( 'Solar Position on ( formattedDate ) ' ) print ( ' ( position.

Should it be possible to develop a dynamic desktop for the Mac? By 'dynamic,' I mean a desktop whose images take system parameters, such as the time and job information, and use this information to update the image. Information about image states would also be preserved between sessions.

Azimuth ) ° Az / ( position. Elevation ) ° El' ) Solar Position on Oct 1, 2018 at 12:00 15840783° Az / 9913847° El At noon on October 1, 2018, the sun shines on Apple Park from the south, about halfway between the horizon and directly overhead. If track the position of the sun over an entire day, we get a sinusoidal shape reminiscent of the Apple Watch “Solar” face.

Extending Our Understanding of XMP Alright, enough astronomy for the moment. Let’s ground ourselves in something much more banal: de facto XML metadata standards.

Remember the has XMP metadata key from before? XMP, or Extensible Metadata Platform, is a standard format for tagging files with metadata. What does XMP look like? Brace yourself. But it’s a good thing that we checked. We’ll need to honor that apple_desktop namespace to make our own Dynamic Desktop images work correctly. Speaking of, let’s get started on that.

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Creating Our Own Dynamic Desktop Let’s create a data model to represent a Dynamic Desktop.