Are.na Screensaver
Turn any Are.na channel into a macOS screensaver.
I built this app from a simple idea I had while traveling through Japan: I wanted the images and references that inspire me creatively to live on my desktop, instead of staying tucked away in a bookmarks tab. What started as a rainy afternoon experiment, became both a creative project and a reason to fall back in love with building personal software.
View on GitHubThe story
I’ve always been a fan of dense masonry grids filled with content.
When I was first getting into graphic design, I had a Tumblr blog where I collected and reposted images that resonated with me. Nowadays no one really use Tumblr anymore, but I found something that captures the same feeling in Are.na. Maybe it’s the lack of an algorithm, or maybe it’s its quiet simplicity. I still keep a private ‘Dump’ Are.na channel, where I collect images, references, and visual inspiration, just as I did over ten years ago.
At the beginning of this year, I spent three weeks traveling through Japan with my sister. It was amazing, but after a couple of weeks we found ourselves missing our own spaces. Not because of comfort, but because of the things we’d collected over the years: books, games, furniture, figures, and all the little objects that inspire us every day.
That led me to think about our “digital collections,” and I had an idea: what if I could have a “wall” of inspiration on my computer, always within reach?
Around that time, Claude Code was all over Twitter, fueled by everyone experimenting with AI projects during the Christmas break. One rainy afternoon in our hotel, I decided to see what all the excitement was about.
Although I have years of experience as a developer, I’d never written a line of Swift, and I wasn’t particularly interested in learning it. I simply wanted to understand how to build a macOS screensaver. AI-assisted tools helped me bridge that gap, teaching me just enough Swift to build it and exposing me to some interesting graphics programming concepts.
I also wanted the user experience to feel a little technical, very in-line with how Are.na feels. That’s why made it a terminal-based app.
This project will always have a special place in my heart. It rekindled my love for programming and reminded me how rewarding it is to build small tools for myself and share them with others :)
Credits
- Video Sound Design Pere Joan Company