Snow coming down through a winter wood in three depths — far flakes small, sharp and slow, near ones large, soft and quick past the eye — all pushed by one wind field that gusts every so often. A cabin sits among the pines with its windows flickering like a fire inside, and its chimney smoke leans with the wind. It is plain Canvas 2D: the scene is painted once, and the flakes are pre-drawn sprites.
A single wind field pushes every flake, the deeper layers more, with gusts that swell and fade; each flake also sways on its own as it falls. A haze of falling snow sits between the ranks of hills.
Self-hosted, read-only container. Snowfall makes no outbound request of any kind, and uses no WebGL — Canvas 2D at a capped 30 frames a second. A window that reports no size, such as a hidden iframe, is skipped rather than painted.
A time — night, dusk, or day — and how heavily it comes down. Switch the cabin off for an empty wood, and add a seed to keep two screens looking at the same trees.
Setup
A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.
F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.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
Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at snowfall.livingkiosk.com/setup.
| Parameter | Default | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
snow | 1 | How heavily it is coming down, 0.2–3; scales the number of flakes in every layer. |
wind | 0.5 | Strength of the wind that pushes the flakes and leans the chimney smoke, 0–2. 0 is calm. |
time | night | dusk or day. The light the wood is seen in. Anything else falls back to night. |
cabin | on | off removes the cabin with its flickering windows and chimney smoke. Only off removes it. |
speed | 1 | A multiplier on everything that moves, 0.2–3. Clamped, not rejected. |
dim | 0 | Neutral black overlay, 0–0.8 (fleet-wide convention). |
seed | — | Pins the wood — the pines, the cabin’s place, and where the flakes begin. |
Snowfall is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.