Ambient Digital Rain for macOS
v1.4 · macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Free forever
What's New
Spectrafall — a new colour cycle mode — plus reliability improvements to the password lock.
A new colour mode that slowly drifts the entire rain through every preset — red, orange, amber, green, cyan, blue, amethyst, and pink — blending smoothly from one to the next. The cycle starts from your currently selected colour so there's no jarring jump on enable. Three speeds: Slow, Normal, and Fast. Mutually exclusive with Chromafall. The clock and message overlays follow the cycling colour throughout.
Password lock now fails closed if authentication is unavailable — the screensaver stays up rather than silently dismissing on an auth error. A stale authentication prompt from before a sleep/wake cycle is also now correctly discarded so it can never dismiss a freshly re-armed lock.
Features
No Dock icon, no clutter. Access everything from the Ξ icon in your menu bar. Launches at login, stays out of the way.
Starts automatically after a configurable idle timeout — 1 minute to 30 minutes, or never. Also activates on system sleep.
Record a system-wide keyboard shortcut to launch the screensaver instantly from any app, no menu required.
Covers every connected display simultaneously, with smooth fade-in and fade-out transitions across all screens.
Green, Amber, Cyan, White, Purple, Blue, Red, Orange, and Pink. Each preset has a coordinated trail and head glyph colour.
Give every falling stream its own randomly chosen colour. Re-randomised each time a stream wraps — always in motion.
Slowly drift the entire rain through every colour preset in hue order — red, orange, amber, green, cyan, blue, amethyst, pink — blending smoothly between each. Three speeds. Starts from your current colour. Clock and message follow along.
Hide a phrase in the rain. Characters materialise one by one as falling columns pass through them, then fade as a group. Includes built-in presets.
Display the time and date in a customisable font, subtly rendered over the rain with slow drift to prevent screen burn.
Require Touch ID, Face ID, or Apple Watch authentication to dismiss. Lock arms automatically once your idle threshold is met. This is a casual privacy lock — it keeps curious eyes out, not a determined attacker. Designed for awareness, not enforcement.
Speed, density, glyph size, trail length, glow, Classic Dense Mode — tweak everything with a live preview in the settings panel.
Pure Swift and AppKit. No third-party dependencies, no screensaver framework workarounds. Just a native Mac app doing its thing.
Checks GitHub for new releases on launch and shows a banner in the menu when one is available. Trigger a manual check any time from the About panel.
Switch between Wide and Narrow column density. Narrow packs columns 25% closer together for a denser, more intense rain effect.
Optionally tie the clock overlay colour to your active rain preset. Toggle it on and the clock tints itself to match — toggle it off for the classic neutral white.
Export your entire configuration to a JSON file and import it back any time. Great for backing up your setup or sharing settings between Macs.
The Story
Cyph3rfall started as a simple question: why isn't there a good Matrix rain screensaver for modern macOS? I had used MatrixMania on Windows for years and missed that feeling. So I decided to build my own — the problem being that I'm not a software developer.
Every feature in this app was conceived and directed by me, and implemented in close collaboration with Claude Code by Anthropic. I described what I wanted in plain language. Claude Code wrote the Swift, caught the bugs, and optimised the rendering. This is what building software looks like when AI handles the code and a human handles the vision.
I think of it as dAId — Directed AI Development. Not vibe coding, where you blindly accept whatever the AI produces. Not traditional development, where you write every line yourself. Something in between: the human holds the vision, makes the decisions, and owns the product. The AI handles the implementation. It is very much a work in progress — and that's exactly the point.
Installation
Cyph3rfall-v1.4.dmg from the
Releases page.
Requirements
Tested on