I recently looked into doing this for my Windows laptop, but found that it halved the battery life. Is this also a problem with running stuff like this on Macs?
Heh it's incredible hearing about someone _trying_ to do this one Windows (and Mac) - I have very vivid memories of Active Desktop on Windows 98 that let you set an HTML page as your 'wallpaper'/on your desktop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop
I remember that some system crashes would cause it to disable itself, with a hyperlink to reenable it. I also remember being obsessed with converting movie clips into animated gifs, and setting those as my background.
I remember it well.
Negligible energy consumption. I wrote a desktop timelapse wallpaper app for Mac that creates a below-the-desktop window containing a movie player and then plays the movie stretched over 24 hrs. Energy impact was small, something like 0.1 in Activity Monitor.
Is this something you would care to share? This would be ideal for watching Wong Kar-wai films.
Sure, send me a mail at the address in my profile. I'll dig up the code tomorrow.
If your app/web page isn’t doing work in the background and doesn’t receive mouse events, the energy impact should be close to nil — it should sit solidly at 0.0% CPU usage in Activity Monitor, else something isn’t right.