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johncoates/aerial

📈 Trending★ 20,975SwiftAudience · generalComplexity · 2/5ActiveLicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

A free Mac screensaver that plays Apple TV's cinematic aerial videos of cities and landscapes, with weather overlays and multilingual descriptions.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Aerial))
    What it does
      Plays aerial videos
      Shows location info
      Displays weather
    Content
      Apple TV footage
      Joshua Michaels videos
      Hal Bergman videos
    Features
      Multilingual captions
      Weather forecasts
      Geographic overlays
    Tech
      Swift language
      macOS native
      Apple Silicon support
    Setup
      Easy installation
      Community maintained
      Free and open source

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Replace your Mac's default screensaver with beautiful cinematic footage of world landmarks.

USE CASE 2

Display live weather information and forecasts on your screensaver while your Mac is idle.

USE CASE 3

Enjoy geographic descriptions and facts about locations in the videos in your preferred language.

Tech stack

SwiftmacOSOpenWeather API

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

Requires OpenWeather API key and macOS build environment with Xcode.

Free and open-source; you can use, modify, and distribute it freely.

In plain English

Aerial is a free, open-source Mac screensaver written in Swift that plays the same cinematic aerial videos used by Apple TV, sweeping footage shot over New York, San Francisco, Hawaii, China, and other locations. It requires macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later and runs natively on Apple Silicon. Starting with version 2.0.0, Aerial also includes additional videos from Joshua Michaels and Hal Bergman. From version 2.3.0 onwards, it can display current weather information and forecasts for your location using OpenWeather. The screensaver shows overlay descriptions of the geographic features visible in each video, with community-contributed translations available in many languages including Spanish, French, and Polish. Downloads and full installation instructions are available at the project's website at aerialscreensaver.github.io. Windows and Linux equivalents are maintained separately by other community contributors.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
How do I install Aerial screensaver on my Mac and set it as my default screensaver?
Prompt 2
Can I customize which aerial videos play on my screensaver, or filter by location?
Prompt 3
How do I enable weather information to display on the Aerial screensaver?
Prompt 4
What languages are supported for the location descriptions in Aerial?
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Generated 2026-05-18 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.