Oskar

Just launched my new personal site: oskargroth.com
Excited to expand my work from native Mac apps into the next era of AI-powered products, and exploring new opportunities to build at scale.

Backdrop 2.0: Video Wallpapers for Your Mac Lock Screen Backdrop 2.0 introduces world-first Lock Screen video wallpapers for Mac, bringing custom video backgrounds to both your Mac desktop and Lock Screen – an exclusive feature available nowhere else.

Announcing Backdrop 2.0 – World First Custom Video Wallpapers on your Mac Lock Screen

cindori.com/news/backdro...

OpenAI dropped GPT-5 yesterday, how are you finding it?

Honestly, I'm not blown away. Doubt I’d pass a blind test vs 4o. Post-training might change that, but for now I’m sticking with Claude Opus 4.1.

New Backdrop detail view design with Liquid Glass UI and live previews

Growing up is realising “organic growth” was never real. It was always either distribution, or leaving it up to chance.

If you’re not spending as much time on distribution as on engineering, you’re not building a product. You’re building a hobby project for one user: yourself.

I've released some huge feature updates to Backdrop lately.
Now I'm also updating the pricing based on user feedback.

Monthly $2.99 -> $1.99
Yearly $19.99 -> $14.99
Lifetime $49.99 -> $39.99

Also offering a 25% discount on Lifetime for a limited time 🔥

Backdrop 1.4 is out! I've added a new detail view with a high-quality preview of each backdrop. Both the thumbnail and detail previews load nearly instantly, and have no negative effect on scrolling performance.

Also added support for Light Mode, and adopted more Liquid Glass design elements 💧

What if Backdrop could play 4K video wallpapers on your Mac lock screen? 👀

Did you know that you can sample the background below a window on macOS?

NSVisualEffectView.windowBackground calculates the avg color of the wallpaper below your window. Together with masks and filters, you can create glass effects without the need for costly blur, making it super performant.

Just when Claude Code was getting good…

What are you gonna do when the weekly cap hits?

One-shotted this whole Backdrop migration admin view in SwiftUI with Claude Code. Was surprised to see it even had working search 🤯

Seems like it's getting better at SwiftUI, been having more and more impressive results lately

I'm migrating the entire Backdrop community platform. It may be temporarily unavailable today. All the Backdrops are getting a new, high-performance video encoding. The thumbnails are also being upgraded, smaller file sizes but 30% higher quality. Plus video thumbnails!

The #1 requested feature for Backdrop is previews of the animated wallpapers.

It took a while, but it's finally happening!

Yep! Lazy & paginated (infinite scroll)

Aaaand its live.
Go try it out 👉 cindori.com/backdrop

I know right? You won’t believe it’s not AppKit!

Built a paginated collection view with masonry/grid layout in SwiftUI. Should I open source it?

Super happy with this design. Backdrop Editor on macOS Tahoe, featuring Liquid Glass UI.

Starting in Backdrop 1.4, you’ll be able to edit & create your own animated video wallpaper for your Mac.

Found the first (and only?) actual use of the morphing Liquid Glass design in macOS Tahoe 🫧

Exactly. So what goes into it? Reading whole files of code over and over is extremely inefficient. A RAG-approach to the whole codebase could inject semantically relevant chunks of code. For example, the AI would already know to use a util func in dir X>Y>Z even if you've only been working in A>B>C.

💧 Sneak peek of the new Backdrop Editor. Create your own macOS video wallpaper in seconds, now with support for trimming, muting and optimising file size with a quality slider. Looks great with the glass style inspector on macOS Tahoe!

Ideally your codebase should not just be code, but also an agent with expert knowledge and insights about the history and projected future of the repo. Able to collaborate with humans, or other agents on your other projects. Not this context window gymnastics we have currently.

There’s a gigantic need for better tooling around AI coding. I hate opening a new Claude and burning tokens + time just to get it oriented again. Docs help, but I wonder if there are gains to be had from a proper, dynamic RAG pipeline with structural & semantic embeddings...

Yikes, poor automator. macOS Tahoe did him dirty 🤖

Try Claude code

Loving this cute app by @ariv.se for getting quick ELI5's or learn new concepts.
Go check it out 👇

Is there a trick to get the sidebar in an NSSplitViewController to extend below the window buttons? Seems to work in SwiftUI, but not AppKit

The Sensei icon was truly ahead of its time 👀

Sensei 2.0 and Backdrop 2.0 are going to be insane

If the new Toggle shape is designed to "match the contour of the human finger", then you gotta ask... why has it been ported to macOS as well?

With the new shape and sizing of the UI on macOS Tahoe, it sure seems like Apple is preparing macOS for a touch-screen capable Mac to release in this cycle.