Snowfall Window

What you can do here

Turn the wind

Move across the window. The snow leans toward the side you’re on, the near flakes most, and goes back to falling almost straight a few seconds after you stop.

Make it snow harder

Snowfall goes from a few flakes to a heavy fall, and the wind outside rises with it.

Keep the tea warm

Steam rises from the mug and thins out as the tea cools, over about ten minutes. Tap the mug to top it up.

Rattle the gate

Tap the gate in the garden and it knocks against its post.

Put on some music

Music plays apart from the scene’s own sound, with its own volume, so you can have either, both or neither. It starts on this scene’s pick and repeats it; open the list to choose another, play them all in order, or shuffle the ones you tick. There are fifteen, all instrumental: twelve carols, from Jingle Bells to O Holy Night, and three pieces written for these scenes. Music only starts when you start it.

Use it as your wallpaper

Press F for fullscreen and M to turn the sound off and on; the volume and your sound choice carry over to every wallpaper. The sound keeps playing if you switch to another tab.

Live link

On a computer desktop

Some wallpaper apps can show a web page behind your desktop icons. Give one the live link above and the scene runs there on its own: no page around it, no ads and no sound.

On a TV or a spare screen

Open this page and press F, or use Fullscreen. While it’s in fullscreen we ask the browser to keep the screen from going to sleep.

On a phone or tablet

Save image downloads exactly what’s on the screen as a picture. Set it as your wallpaper from your photos; the phone will crop the sides.

A live wallpaper keeps a page running all day. Through the live link the scene draws at most 30 frames a second and stops while the screen is covered, but on a laptop it still costs some battery.

Why the nearest flakes look soft

The garden is in focus, so the flakes falling just outside the glass are too close to be sharp: they show as larger, softer shapes, while the ones out by the trees are small, crisp specks. That spread of depth is most of what makes falling snow look like snow and not like noise on a screen.

About the sounds

Two recordings and one quiet layer: winter wind muffled by the glass, a wooden gate settling against its post, and the air of a quiet room. Snow itself makes almost no sound, so none is added for the flakes.

If you’d rather just watch

• Snowy Window, a drawn winter window screensaver
• Screensavers drawn live in the browser, with music