Ugly Christmas Sweater Wallpapers (Mac Edition)
A collection of lovingly hand-knitted wallpapers for your Mac just in time for the holidays.
Last week, I released a collection of Ugly Christmas Sweater iPhone wallpapers featuring Happy Macintosh and Clarus the Dogcow, both iconic figures in Apple lore, and the reception to both was tremendously positive.
Ugly Christmas Sweaters (iPhone)
iPhone versions of the Ugly Christmas Sweater featuring Happy Macintosh & Clarus the dogcow available here.
I had no time to complete any more versions at launch, so I limited my release to the iPhone. But in a real Christmas miracle, I happened across a rare pocket of time and devoted it to see if I could expand the wallpaper for the Mac.
The task, at least conceptually, was straightforward. The wallpaper is composed of bands featuring a distinct but repeating pattern. All I needed to do was centre the pattern and copy and paste the design to elongate the wallpaper. Do that for each band, and I'd be done in a few minutes. Wrong! Because each thread is its layer, the total number of layers in this project quickly grew to over 63,000 (63,158, to be exact), which hammered the Mac's memory. Oddly enough, my MacBook Air (MBA) handled the project more efficiently than my Mac Studio, which has more cores and memory, making me think something was happening in how the software was optimized for that chip. But even on the MBA, the process came to feel like operating a rover on Mars, where each adjustment would take 5-30 seconds to execute. And when you are making dozens upon dozens of adjustments, it results in tons of added time watching the beachball spin, waiting for each operation to complete. The lesson here might be that I need to figure out more efficient ways of working with that volume of layers, but that's a problem for the 2024 Ugly Christmas Sweater.
I hope you enjoy what'll likely be my last wallpaper of 2023. The design features Clarus the Dogcow & Happy Macintosh in the same five colours I introduced last week. Enjoy & my warmest holiday wishes to everyone.
Downloads
Happy Macintosh
Clarus the Dogcow
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