Do you ever wish your Mac’s wallpaper was a little more…animated? Plash is a free app that lets you turn any website into your desktop wallpaper—and you’ll even be able to interact with it.
There’s an easy way to use transform any YouTube video into wallpaper on Windows—this is the Mac version of that trick, and you can use any website. There are some practical, boring reasons you might want to do this. For example, maybe you find the desktop widgets in macOS Sonoma underwhelming and would rather turn your desktop into a giant Google Calendar. Let’s be real, though: The fun reason is some you can set something awesome and awesome as your wallpaper.
How to turn any URL into an animated wallpaper on Mac
Get started by downloading Plash from the Mac App Store or Github. The application lives in the menu bar—click the icon to configure it.
Credit: Justin Pot
I recommend clicking Add Website and adding a few URLs. You can add literally any website, of course, but that’s overwhelming. Happily there’s a thread full of great use cases on Github. Here are a few highlights:
A webcam from a random window, so you can pretend you’re somewhere else.
Global wind patterns, so you can oversee the planet from above.
Bing’s Photo of the Day, so you can see a random photo every day without using Bing.
Random Street View, so you can see random places all day.
The infamous flying toasters, so you can relive the 80s.
Classic art combined with quotes, so you can feel smart and stuff.
Matrix falling code, so you can pretend to be in a dorm room circa 2003.
Credit: Justin Pot
This is just a smattering of your options—there’s a literal internet full of more. Whatever you decide to use, know that you can enable the Browsing Mode from the menu bar if you need to actually interact with the website you’ve turned into your wallpaper.
You can also optionally set custom CSS for any website, allowing you to do things like turn the background for a website transparent so that you can see your desktop. There are a few examples of how to tweak your settings in that thread I mentioned earlier, including code and instructions for Google Calendar. This is the kind of application you can spend a lot of time playing with, so enjoy.
