Matrix Digital Rain Screensaver

A Matrix-style screensaver for macOS with a personalized intro sequence and real-time falling green characters.

Features

• Personalized intro — "Wake up, <your name>..." typed with a blinking cursor, using your Mac username
• Authentic digital rain — Matrix-Code font with 57 custom glyphs, glowing white heads and fading green trails
• Frame-rate independent — wall-clock timing for the intro, delta-time for the rain. Consistent speed at any FPS
• Multi-display & adaptive — scales to any screen resolution across all connected displays

Installation

Download

1. Download MatrixDigitalRain.saver.zip from Releases
2. Unzip and double-click MatrixDigitalRain.saver to install
3. Select it in System Settings > Screen Saver

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/cassmtnr/matrix-macos-screensaver.git
cd matrix-macos-screensaver

xcodebuild -project MatrixDigitalRain.xcodeproj \
  -scheme MatrixDigitalRain \
  -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath build \
  build

open build/Build/Products/Release/MatrixDigitalRain.saver

Requires macOS 11.0+.

Development

# Build
xcodebuild -project MatrixDigitalRain.xcodeproj \
  -scheme MatrixDigitalRain -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath build build

# Preview (Cmd+Q to quit)
swift preview.swift
swift preview.swift --duration 30

# Tests
xcodebuild -project MatrixDigitalRain.xcodeproj \
  -scheme MatrixDigitalRain -configuration Debug test

# Generate preview GIF (requires ffmpeg)
swift generate_preview.swift --help

Releasing

Releases are signed with a Developer ID Application certificate, notarized, and published manually from a local Mac. The short version:

./scripts/sign-and-notarize.sh
gh release create vX.Y.Z MatrixDigitalRain.saver.zip --generate-notes

See RELEASING.md for prerequisites (Developer ID cert, App Store Connect API key, notarytool keychain profile), step-by-step instructions, verification, and troubleshooting.

Project Structure

MatrixDigitalRain/
├── MatrixConfig.swift           # All tunable constants
├── MatrixColumn.swift           # Single falling column logic
├── IntroSequence.swift          # "Wake up..." intro state machine
├── MatrixDigitalRainView.swift  # Main ScreenSaverView subclass
├── Matrix-Code.ttf              # Custom font (57 glyphs)
└── Info.plist

License

MIT