macOS app Version 1.0

Warm Mittens

It can be snowing outside the window while the screen in front of you looks exactly as it did in July. Warm Mittens makes it snow on the Mac instead. Flakes drift down over whatever you are working on, settle on the tops of your windows and slide off when you move them. At the bottom of the screen they pile up into a drift, and when it gets deep a small snowplow drives through and clears it. It lives in the menu bar, and the snow never gets in the way of a click.

Get it on the Mac App Store macOS 13+ · free · 32 MB
Pro is an optional one-time purchase inside the app.

Snow on the desktop and on the window, and the plow starting into the drift at the bottom.

The snow

It lands where you would expect it to.

The snow is drawn in a transparent layer over the whole screen that clicks pass straight through, so you keep working underneath it. Flakes come in three depths: small faint ones far away, bigger ones close up, and now and then a whole snow crystal turning as it falls. Wind pushes all of them sideways. The slider goes from a few flurries to a blizzard.

It knows where your windows are (their size and position, never what is in them) so the closer flakes land on the window tops and build up there. Snow that slides off the end of a window gathers for a while and then lets go as a puff of powder.

Snow on window tops

Move the window and it comes off in clumps that keep the window's speed, so a quick drag throws it. Switch to another desktop and it waits for you to come back.
Icicles

Short ones grow under each window while it snows, in clusters with gaps between them and the odd long one. A gentle move carries them along; it takes a shake to snap them off, or a drag through them with the mouse button held.
The drift

Builds up along the bottom of the screen in a lumpy, uneven line and melts away slowly when the snow stops. You set how deep it may get.
The plowwith engine sound

Press the tile in the menu and it drives across, pushing a ramp of snow ahead of the blade and throwing the rest into the air. Click it as it passes to give it a boost.

The plow clearing the drift in front of the Dock.

Snowballs

You can throw one at a friend's screen.

Add a friend by swapping codes (they look like SNOW-7K3Q) and you can throw snowballs at each other's Macs. You aim at a small window shaped like their screen, set the power, and the wind bends the throw. On their Mac it hits the glass in front of everything, Dock included, flattens with a splat, sticks for a moment so they can read it and then slides down into their drift. Click it to wipe it off early.

Each snowball carries one note from a fixed list of twenty: Coffee?, Lunch?, Call me, Gaming later? and so on, with Yes, No and Maybe for answering. There is no free text, so there is nothing to moderate and nothing anyone can send you that you would not want on your screen. Only friends you have accepted can throw at you, and you can turn snowballs off.

You can throw ten a day. To try it without a friend, throw one at yourself.

Focus

The drift as a timer.

Switch on Pomodoro and the drift becomes the clock. Over 25 minutes of work it fills up to the top. When the time is up, the plow comes through on its own and clears it for a five-minute break, and then it starts again. You can see how far along you are from the corner of your eye, which is about as much attention as a timer deserves.

There is also an optional night-wind sound, a long recording of a snowstorm heard from indoors, that plays while it snows. It is off until you turn it on.

Pro

Other ways to clear the snow.

Warm Mittens Pro is a one-time purchase inside the app. It adds three more members to the clearing crew and raises your snowballs from ten a day to a hundred. It is the most frivolous part of an app that is frivolous to begin with, and it is also what pays for the snowball server.

Santa's sleigh

Santa on a snowmobile, towing a sleigh full of presents on a rope. The rope is simulated: it goes taut when he pulls away, sags when the sleigh catches up, and the sleigh jerks forward when you give him a boost.
The flamethrower

A man in a yellow raincoat walks in and melts the drift ahead of him, stopping to fire at anything above his knees. Hold the mouse on him for a full blast; double-click for one big enough to send him off at a run.
The big snowball

Rolls in from the left and picks up the drift as it goes, growing with every bit of snow it gathers, until a ball the size of the snow you had rolls off the edge of the screen.

A drawing of a man in a long yellow raincoat, blue trousers, black boots and a gas mask, leaning into a flamethrower. A long orange and yellow flame streams out to the right across a dark blue background, breaking into small blobs of fire at its tip. — The flamethrower at full blast. In the app he is walking along the drift and the snow under the flame steams away.

What you are paying for

The three clearing tools run on your own Mac and keep working for good, whatever happens to anything else. The hundred snowballs a day depend on the snowball service, which runs on a server I pay for. I intend to keep it running, but online services do change and one day this one may stop. If it does, the snow, the drift, the icicles and the whole crew carry on as before.

Limits

What it does not do.

Snow costs some energy

A full blizzard means a couple of thousand flakes drawn sixty times a second over the whole screen. On a recent Mac that is a modest load; on an older one, keep the snowfall lower or switch it off when you need the battery.
It does not read your screen

It uses only the positions and sizes of windows, which is why it needs no screen recording permission. It cannot see what is in them.
The menu bar can hide it

On a Mac with a notch and a full menu bar, the snowflake can be pushed out of sight. Opening Warm Mittens again from Launchpad or Spotlight brings up its panel, and it can show a Dock icon instead.
Snowballs need the internet

Throwing at friends goes through the snowball server, with an anonymous account per Mac: no email, no password. Everything else works offline. The privacy policy lists exactly what the server keeps.
Mac only

It is built on the Mac's own frameworks, so there is no Windows version yet.

Download

Version 1.0, free on the Mac App Store.

Installing

Get it from the Mac App Store and open it: a snowflake appears in the menu bar and it starts snowing. The first time, the panel opens on its own so you can find it. Needs macOS 13 or later and runs on Apple silicon and Intel. Updates come through the App Store.

Questions and fixes are on the support page. If something is wrong, tell me.

Credits

The wallpapers include photos by Erol Ahmed, Michael Niessl and BehindTheTmuna from Unsplash. The plow's engine is "Hover vehicle idle loop" by MickBoere and the night wind is "Howling winter storm ambient sounds" by DBlover, both from Freesound under CC0.

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