u/PiXeL161616

This runs live on an Apple silicon GPU.
The school is a classic flocking simulation, a few thousand agents with separation, alignment and cohesion plus a milling bias that makes them form the rotating ball. The orcas are autonomous agents with a hunt state machine (patrol, position, charge, recover) that carve a void through the school as the fish panic, and the fear spreads neighbour to neighbour faster than any fish swims.
The god rays are computed each frame from a simulated water surface, and the marine snow drifts through them. Everything persists and evolves by its own rules, nothing is keyframed, and it never repeats. Built in Swift and Metal as part of TideGlass, a small Mac app I make where worlds like this run on a second monitor while you work and interacts with your music. Happy to answer anything about the sim.

Hey r/macapps!

I built TideGlass because I focus better with something calm beside my work, and everything I tried was either a video loop or a light show, or content in some algorithm that wanted me to continue watching. So I built worlds instead.

TideGlass fills a spare monitor with living nature scenes: oceans, forests, night skies, deep space. Each world is a real simulation running on your GPU, optimized for Macs and Metal: waves roll and fade by their own physics, orcas hunt, stars rise, weather passes through. It is there to help you focus. It asks nothing of you, and no two minutes are the same.

The video shows it better than screenshots.

A few of the things it does:

A whole library of worlds, from a moonlit sea to a herring ball under hunting orcas to the Pillars of Creation built from the real JWST plate. Every world keeps its own clock: things happen in them while you work.

Play music and everything moves with it. It listens to whatever is playing (Apple Music, Spotify, anything through system audio) and the world answers: wind rises with the track, swells deepen, storms build on the phrases. The music becomes weather, never bars and spectrums.

A focus timer that fits the room: a Pomodoro pill in the corner whose whole background is the progress bar, next to a now-playing card for the track you have on.

Standing desk support, new this month: turn it on and the timer also says when to sit and when to stand. Sessions alternate on the rhythm the ergonomics research recommends, and when a break ends with a posture change the whole screen says so.

The part I want to call out

The worlds are simulations, not videos. The orca pod is the example I keep showing people: the school is a real flocking simulation, the orcas are agents that patrol, take turns attacking, and slap through the wall of fish, and the marine snow drifts through light rays computed every frame. When your music picks up, the whole hunt quickens. None of it is footage. That is the entire idea of the app.

Comparison

The closest things are Aerial and the video wallpapers built into macOS. Both play beautifully shot footage, and footage loops: the same drone pass, the same seam. TideGlass renders its worlds live, so they never repeat and they can react to your music, which a video cannot do. And where wallpaper apps live under your windows, TideGlass holds a spare monitor as its own calm place, with a focus timer in it.

Pricing

- Ten worlds free forever. No account, no card, nothing to expire.

- 12 dollars, one-time, opens the whole library. No renewals or subscriptions

- We donate 20% of every sale to environmental non-profits, protecting oceans and dark skies.

Transparency

I'm Chris, building this on my own. TideGlass is native Swift and Metal, signed and notarized, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon.

Website: https://tideglass.app

Contact: hello@tideglass.app

Privacy Policy: https://tideglass.app/privacy

Terms of Service: https://tideglass.app/terms

If you try it, tell me which world you end up leaving on, and what still needs work.

Cheers

We sell a couple of our own small apps. Every time we shipped one we hit the same wall: how do you turn a Stripe payment into a licence key, and how does the app check that key when the customer's laptop is on a plane?

The existing options are Keygen, Cryptlex, LicenseSpring, or LemonSqueezy's licensing. They work. They also charge per active user or take a percentage, and your customer data lives on their servers. For a small product that's a recurring line item for a problem that's already solved.

So we built it and open-sourced it under MIT: https://coolbeans.tools

What it does: a Stripe or PayPal webhook comes in, a key gets issued and emailed, and your app makes one call and gets one answer.

const state = await cb.open(licenseKey)
if (state.decision === 'deny') lockApp(state.reason)

You can selfhost it or use the hosted version with $0 while you're small (1 product, 500 active licences) and $99 a year flat after that for everything. Not per seat, not a percentage. Ten keys or ten thousand is the same price. I'd rather have a boring predictable number than be incentivised to tax someone's growth.

Worth saying plainly: this is for downloadable software, so desktop, CLI, Electron, Tauri, Mac and iOS. If you're pure web SaaS you probably don't need it, you already have auth and subscriptions.

There's also Swift SDK and a TypeScript one, and both run against the same fixture file so they agree on who stays unlocked.

Code is at https://github.com/GoldenBerry-SO/coolbeans. Happy to answer anything