Rain

A curtain of falling glyphs, each column its own drop — speed, trail length, and the gap before the next one all varying so nothing reads as an obvious loop. The default glyph is original: a short procedural walk of angular strokes on a 5×5 grid, not any one studio’s typeface. Five colours, four glyph sets, either direction, and a seed that keeps two screens in the same rain.

Live demo →Setup Put it on a screen

Rain in the default green-on-black theme: columns of falling angular rune-like glyphs, most dim mid-trail and a few bright white heads. — Green, runesThe default: original procedural glyphs, falling.

Rain in amber with the latin glyph set: columns of falling uppercase and lowercase letters in amber, denser than the default. — Amber, latinA different colour and a different glyph set.

About the glyphs

The falling-columns genre is old and generic; a specific studio’s exact glyph design is not. Rain’s default set is an original procedural glyph — each one a pure function of a numeric id, nothing traced or adapted from any existing typeface or film asset. Latin, digit, and mixed sets are the alternative, in a self-hosted open-source monospace.

If you self-host

Self-hosted, read-only container. Rain makes no outbound request of any kind — there is no data source, just the URL’s own configuration computed in the browser.

What it wants

A colour, a density, a direction, and optionally a seed — two screens given the same seed and configuration fall in step, computing the same math from the same wall clock rather than sharing frames.

Setup

Put Rain on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install

Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

LivingKiosk app

Get the app and its install steps at livingkiosk.com/mac. It isn’t notarized yet, so macOS asks you to approve it once.
Menu bar → Library… and pick a display for each screen.
Configure… on any screen for its reload schedule, dim, and saved configs.

See the Mac app →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk

On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.

fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at rain.livingkiosk.com/setup.

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`color`	green	`amber`, `cyan`, `white`, `red`, or a `#hex` value.
`speed`	1	Fall-speed multiplier, 0.2–3.
`density`	0.96	Fraction of columns raining, per layer, 0.15–1.
`trail`	28	Base trail length in cells, 4–80.
`glyphset`	runes	`latin`, `digits`, or `mixed`. `runes` is Rain’s original procedural glyph.
`direction`	down	`up` for the same rain, rising.
`bg`	dark	`light` or a `#hex` ground colour.
`seed`	—	Pins the column layout and glyph choices so two screens match.
`dim`	0	Black scrim over everything, `0` to `0.8` (fleet-wide convention).

Rain is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.