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Tide

A beach from straight above: swell lines rolling in and breaking into lace, each wave running up the sand fast and draining back slow, leaving dark wet sand that glistens with the sky for a moment. Two wave trains overlap and arrive a little out of step along the shore, so no two stretches wash alike. It is one fragment shader, and the sea can lie on any side of the screen.

Live demo →SetupPut it on a screen
Tide with the tropical colours: pale sand on the left, a white foam line along a wavering shoreline, bright turquoise shallows, and deeper blue water to the right crossed by pale swell lines.
TropicalThe default: bright turquoise shallows over pale sand.
Tide with the temperate colours: the same pale sand and foam line, with muted teal shallows and a deep navy sea beyond, swell lines showing as thin pale streaks.
TemperateThe same shore in darker, cooler water.

The swash of a real beach

A quick run up the sand, a long slide back, and dark wet sand left behind. The water is clear where it thins over the sand, turquoise in the shallows and deep blue further out, with a bright foam line on each leading edge.

If you self-host

Self-hosted, read-only container. Tide makes no outbound request at all — one shader, drawn at 80% of the capped pixel ratio and touched at most 30 times a second.

What it wants

A colour set — tropical, temperate, or dusk — and which edge of the screen the sea lies toward. That last one matters on a portrait panel or across a wall of monitors, where you choose which side the shoreline runs along.

Setup

Put Tide on a screen.

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

Any screen

nothing to install
  1. Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
  2. Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
  3. 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>.
  4. Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

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

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk
  1. On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
  2. Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
  3. Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
  4. 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 tide.livingkiosk.com/setup.

ParameterDefaultMeaning
watertropicaltemperate or dusk. The colour set for sand, water, foam, and sky.
searightleft, top, or bottom. Which edge of the screen the sea lies toward.
waves1How lively the surf is, 0.3–2: higher means waves arrive more often and run further up the sand. Clamped, not rejected.
speed1A multiplier on the pace of everything, 0.2–3. Clamped, not rejected.
dim0Neutral darkening overlay, 0–0.8 (fleet-wide convention).
seed—Pins the shape of the shoreline and where the first wave is in its cycle, so the same URL always begins the same way.

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