Support

Dusk renders a few lines of maths on the GPU rather than playing video, which is far lighter than a video wallpaper. You can also lower the cost: set the frame rate to 15 fps and turn off Retina quality in Settings to render at half resolution. Dusk pauses itself automatically in Low Power Mode and whenever your display sleeps, and it stops rendering entirely when its window is covered.

Yes. Open Settings (the gear on the left rail) and change "Apply to" from All Displays to a specific screen, then pick a wallpaper. Dusk notices when displays are connected or disconnected and rebuilds itself around them.

Select any wallpaper from the shelf along the bottom. The panel on the right has three tabs: Colors for background and accent, Motion for speed, zoom, glow and hue, and Style for controls unique to that piece. "Reset to defaults" restores the original look of the selected wallpaper.

It is Dusk's own screen saver. After the number of minutes you choose with no keyboard or mouse activity, the live wallpaper fades up to fill the whole screen. Any key press, click or mouse movement dismisses it instantly. It works with every wallpaper in the library.

"Match Lock Screen wallpaper" renders a still of your current wallpaper and sets it as the system desktop picture, so the Lock Screen matches your backdrop. The version downloaded from this site also includes an experimental "Live Lock Screen (beta)" option that renders a looping video into a macOS wallpaper slot so the Lock Screen itself animates. It requires choosing that wallpaper once in System Settings, and it keeps a backup of the file it replaces so the original can be restored. This beta feature is not part of the Mac App Store version.

Only if you ask it to. Turn on "Launch at login" in Settings. You can also hide the Dock icon there and run Dusk purely from the menu bar.

Make sure you are on version 1.0 or later, which fixed a bug that could load the main thread and cause dropped frames over time. If it persists, try 30 fps instead of 60, turn off Retina quality, and check whether another GPU-heavy app is running. If none of that helps, email us with your Mac model and macOS version.

No personal data, ever. No accounts, no analytics, no trackers. The version from this site does make one kind of request: it asks for a signed list of new wallpapers, sending nothing but the app version. Switch off "Receive new wallpapers" in Settings and it stops entirely. The Mac App Store build has no network access at all. See the privacy policy.