Daily Mac App: Magic Window

If you're tired of looking at that stale Mac OS desktop, think about adding Magic Window to your visual bag of tricks.

Magic Window, available through the Mac App Store for US$2.99 (on sale) comes with 14 striking landscapes that change over time, so you see the skies change and the sun might rise or set. You get to control the speed, and you also can make the images black and white or sepia. Each loop contains about a thousand images.

The high-resolution scenes support my 30-inch monitor without looking blocky. Once you have the app, you have an option to download more scenes at no additional cost. There are a total of 40 scenes you can choose from. They are grouped by themes such as mountains, beaches, sunsets and so on.

This app is reminiscent of Sundial from Aladdin Systems, which was a pre-OS X Mac application. It's long gone, but the novelty of Sundial was that it tied the scene to your system clock so as the sun was rising locally, your screen was displaying the same thing. Magic Window doesn't do that, darn it, and most of the loops don't run 24 hours. Josh Michaels, one of the creators of the app, tells me that the app will eventually have that feature, which is most welcome. I'd love to see that.

I like Magic Window. It gives my desktop some much-needed variety. It supports multiple monitors and you can have different scenes on each one. You also get the option to use Magic Window as a screen-saver, and you can randomly shuffle the scenes.

Magic Window is also available for iOS devices, and we reviewed the iPad version last year.

The sale runs until Dec. 29 when the price returns to $9.99. I'm hoping Magic Window will be updated with new scenes and features over time, but it's very nice as it is.

Check out the gallery for some samples from the image collection.