Macify

Replace Chrome's new tab page with macOS's aerial screensaver videos and a small set of calm, optional widgets. macOS is not required — videos are streamed from Apple's CDN and play in any platform that runs Chrome.

Features

• 🎥 156 aerial videos in 4K SDR, sourced from Apple's current macOS catalog (Landscapes, Cities, Underwater, Space, and more).
• 🌤️ Live weather — current temperature, "feels like", 3-day forecast, sunrise/sunset, UV, wind, air quality. Powered by Open-Meteo, no API key required.
• 📌 Top sites widget pulled from Chrome's built-in list (no history permission needed).
• 💬 Random quotes from a curated 500-entry public-domain set.
• 🧘 Zen mode — fullscreen the video with optional ambient music.
• 🔤 4 languages — English, 简体中文, 繁體中文, 日本語.

Install

Install from Chrome Web Store.

Building from source or contributing? See DEVELOPMENT.md.

Choosing a video source

Two options. Each has a built-in step-by-step guide inside Macify's settings page; this section just summarises.

1. Apple Server (default — zero setup)

Streams directly from sylvan.apple.com. Chrome may not trust Apple's certificate by default; two ways to fix it:

Option A — Reverse proxy (default on, easiest). Video requests are routed through a hosted Cloudflare Worker that handles the certificate dance. Zero local setup. Convenient but should not be relied on long-term — set up local hosting or trust the cert when possible.

Option B — Trust Apple's cert manually (cleanest). Visit https://sylvan.apple.com once in Chrome. You'll see a security warning — click "Advanced", then "Proceed to sylvan.apple.com (unsafe)". Chrome remembers the trust and direct connection works thereafter.

2. Local server (recommended for macOS users)

Best performance, zero third-party dependency. One command configures macOS's built-in Apache to serve your local Aerial videos at http://localhost:18000/videos/:

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jason5ng32/Macify/main/scripts/local-server/setup.sh)

Asks for your password once (sudo). Then in Macify's settings, switch the source to Local server.

To uninstall:

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jason5ng32/Macify/main/scripts/local-server/uninstall.sh)

The local server needs the videos on disk first. Two ways:

Through System Settings. Open System Settings → Screen Saver → Aerial. Click each video you want (each is 500MB–1GB). Tedious for the full 156-video catalog but no extras needed.

One-line batch downloader. Macify includes a Python downloader that pulls the full Aerial catalog (or a subset) directly from Apple's CDN, with progress bars, resume support, and category/random/limit filters:

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jason5ng32/Macify/main/scripts/aerial_downloader/install.sh)

Copy the command, paste it in Terminal, and follow the on-screen prompts. The full catalog is ~80–150 GB; the script reports the estimated size and your free disk space before asking for confirmation, so you can safely back out.

Permissions

Macify requests these permissions, all non-sensitive:

Permission	Used for
storage	Persist user preferences and cache weather data.
topSites	Read Chrome's most-visited list for the Top Sites widget.
favicon	Show favicons next to Top Sites entries (uses Chrome's built-in cache; no external network).
idle	Track when the user is away from the computer to determine showing Zen mode notification or not.

No history permission. No host permissions for arbitrary sites.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Credits

Created by Jason Ng, Dofy, Setilis. Aerial videos are © Apple Inc.