Sometime around middle school, the Mac SE/30 in the corner of the classroom would nod off, and a squadron of winged chrome toasters came flapping across that little 9‑inch black‑and‑white screen, slices of toast tumbling along behind them. I'd lose whole study halls just watching them drift by.
This is that screen saver, brought back for modern macOS — the genuine After Dark toasters, running native and crisp on a Retina display. Same lazy diagonal glide, same flapping wings, same golden toast.
Grab the latest build from the
Releases page —
a universal .saver (Apple Silicon + Intel), no Xcode required.
- Download Flying-Toasters-1.0.saver.zip and unzip it.
- Clear the download quarantine (the saver is signed ad‑hoc, not notarized):
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/"Flying Toasters.saver"
- Double‑click Flying Toasters.saver → click Install.
- Choose Flying Toasters in System Settings → Screen Saver.
Click Options… in System Settings → Screen Saver:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Number of toasters | How many fill the sky (1–60). |
| Toast | How much toast flies alongside. |
| Speed | How fast they drift. |
| Toast darkness | Golden → burnt. |
| Faint starfield | Optional stars behind the toasters (off by default). |
There's also a small Flying Toasters.app (./build-app.sh) that runs the saver in a
window with the same Options, handy for tweaking with a live preview.
git clone https://github.com/warpspeedtech/flying-toasters
cd flying-toasters
./build.sh # -> build/Flying Toasters.saver (UNIVERSAL=1 for arm64 + x86_64)
./install.sh # install for the current user
./uninstall.sh # remove it
./preview.sh # quick windowed run, no installRequires macOS 11+ and the Xcode command‑line tools (swiftc) — no Xcode project.
src/
Sprites.swift Genuine After Dark sprites, embedded as base64
ToasterArt.swift Slices the sprite sheet into wing frames; tints toast; caches CGImages
ToasterScene.swift The simulation: spawn, parallax motion, flap timing, compositing
ToasterSettings.swift Plain settings value type (AppKit-free, so it's testable)
Defaults.swift ScreenSaverDefaults persistence
ConfigureSheet.swift Programmatic Options sheet (no nib)
FlyingToastersView.swift ScreenSaverView principal class — ties it together
tools/
preview_main.swift Standalone app (live player + Options)
render_scene.swift Headless full-frame PNG renderer
render_gif.swift Seamlessly-looping demo GIF renderer
render_sprites.swift Headless sprite-sheet renderer
load_test.swift Loads the built .saver exactly as macOS does and runs a frame
defaults_test.swift Checks settings persist to the shared preferences domain
The toasters and toast use the genuine original sprites (the 256×64 four‑frame sheet and
the 64×64 toast), blitted with nearest‑neighbor scaling so the pixel art stays crisp on
Retina. ToasterArt and ToasterScene are pure Core Graphics, so frames can be rendered
headlessly — that's how the images here were made.
After Dark and Flying Toasters were created by Berkeley Systems, and the toaster and toast pixel art is theirs. The sprites were taken from the open After Dark: Flying Toasters.saver by Rasmus Andersson (rsms), whose WebView port embedded Bryan Braun's after‑dark‑css artwork. This is an independent, non‑commercial homage; After Dark and Flying Toasters are trademarks of their respective owners, and this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.
The source code is MIT‑licensed (see LICENSE). The sprite artwork
(src/Sprites.swift, assets/*.gif) belongs to its rights‑holders and is not
covered by that license — it's bundled for a credited, non‑commercial homage. If you fork
this, please keep the attributions and don't sell it.