Optimizing Battery & Hardware Performance (Zero Battery Drain)

Canvas is engineered from the ground up to respect your MacBook's battery life. Unlike standard web-based or electron-wrapped wallpaper engines, Canvas has a native hardware-accelerated rendering pipeline that achieves practically 0% active CPU utilization when you are busy working.

How Canvas Smart Pausing Works

The app operates an ultra-lightweight background observer (StateMonitor) that checks system activity every 3 seconds:

• Overlapping Fullscreen Apps: The moment you maximize a web browser, word processor, or work window to fill your display, Canvas instantly detects that the wallpaper is hidden and pauses video rendering entirely, dropping GPU usage to zero.
• Gaming Mode: If you launch a game (such as Minecraft or any Steam title), Canvas detects the active game process and immediately freezes background loops to redirect 100% of your GPU and CPU power to your game.
• Screensaver & Sleep: Whenever your Mac goes to sleep or activates the screensaver, Canvas pauses instantly.
• Low Power Mode Throttling: When your MacBook enters macOS Low Power Mode, Canvas automatically throttles playback speeds to preserve battery capacity.

Adjusting Caching Limits

To prevent high-definition 4K videos from eating up your disk space, Canvas manages a strict Least Recently Used (LRU) cache:

1. Open Preferences (Cmd + ,) and go to the Performance & Storage tab.
2. Adjust the Cache Limit slider (from 2 GB to 30 GB).
3. Once your imported wallpapers exceed this size, Canvas automatically deletes older, unused cached files in the background to protect your hard drive space.