59I want a scene behind my app
A quiet scene behind your pages, in your theme's own colours
Some days you want the app plain and out of the way. Other days a little weather behind the work is exactly right. An atmosphere is a scene drawn very quietly behind the app’s pages, painted in the colours of the theme you are already using, so it never fights with what is on top of it. Every theme comes with one. You decide whether it shows, and whether it holds still or moves.
- Nothing to switch on first. The setting is waiting on the colour theme screen.
- It starts Off, so if you have never looked, you have never seen it.
- It works with whichever theme and surface style you already use.
Atmosphere Off — the plain background
Atmosphere Still — the same screen, with the scene behind it
Think of it as the light in the room rather than anything you have to read. A scene sits far behind your patterns, projects and stash, drawn in the theme’s own colours so it stays quiet. Yarn balls, snow, mountains, waves: whatever suits that particular theme. It is the same choice you make picking yarn for a shawl. You are not just choosing a colour, you are choosing what it feels like to sit with for a while. Some people want the plain background and always will. That is a perfectly good answer too.
Go to Settings, then Appearance, then Color Theme. On that screen there is a group called Appearance options, holding Appearance, Applies to, Surface and Atmosphere together. It lives here, next to the theme itself, rather than on the Appearance screen you passed through, because it belongs to the theme’s own look. If you have been hunting for it on the Appearance settings screen, that is why you have not found it.
Off gives you the plain background, and nothing changes. Still draws the scene and leaves it exactly where it is, like a picture on the wall behind you. Drift lets it move very slowly, slowly enough that you notice it only when you look up from a row. Try each one for an evening rather than a moment. If you want to see more of it, set your surface style to Minimal or Pure: the cards are filled in less, so more of the scene comes through behind them.
All 40 built-in themes carry a scene of their own, chosen to suit that theme’s colours rather than borrowed from a common picture. Change theme and the backdrop changes with it. This is worth knowing if you are still trying themes on. A theme you thought was not for you might read quite differently with its scene showing, and one you liked might settle further once the background arrives. Leave Atmosphere on Still while you browse and you will see each theme the way it was put together.
If you make a theme in the Dye your own editor, you pick its scene as well as its colours, from nineteen, plus None if you would rather it stayed plain.
| Weather and sky | |
|---|---|
| Snow | Big soft flakes drifting close to you, out of focus, with a fine powder of distant snow behind them. Six-armed crystals, drawn properly. |
| Rain | A rain cloud with a darker, rain-heavy underside, a smaller one trailing behind it, and the rain coming down. |
| Fog | Banks of fog with hills dissolving between them, and a dim disc of sun burning somewhere behind it all. |
| Clouds | A cloud seen side-on, its sunlit shoulder above and its flat base below, and the sun behind the weather – halo, disc and four rays. |
| Aurora | Curtains of light with near-vertical rays hanging from them, the way a real aurora breaks into columns. |
| Stars | A night sky with the Little Dipper picked out – the stars of the asterism, and the thin lines joining them. |
| Landscape and water | |
| Mountains | A low sun over the far range, ridges receding into the light with the nearer ones dark on their shaded side, and birds crossing the valley. |
| Icebergs | A polar sun low on the horizon and its glow on the water, floes along the horizon line, and ripples running across the open sea. |
| Waves | Open water with swell and surf, sun glinting on the surface, and gulls working the wind above it. |
| Growing things | |
| Trees | A forest in rows – a distant ridge almost dissolved in haze, a paler stand behind, fuller rows in front – with sun shafts slanting through the canopy. |
| Leaves | Leaves falling, and the bough they are falling from reaching in from the corner. |
| Flowers | A meadow in bloom, standing in a grass line with tufts breaking through it, and a fainter row of blooms further back. |
| Craft | |
| Yarn balls | Three balls of yarn and a fourth rolled away in the distance, the working thread wandering between them – and riding on the thread, a dropped loop and live stitches. |
| Stitches | Chart texture: knit Vs, purl dots and yarn-over rings interleaved the way a real chart reads, with a cable panel running up through it. |
| Columns | A colonnade, and a second one deeper in the ruin: a pediment with its oculus, the architrave, and a frieze with triglyphs spaced along it. |
| Light and colour | |
| Bokeh | Out-of-focus discs of light, with one anamorphic streak drawn across the frame. |
| Confetti | Triangle scraps tumbling through the air. |
| Gems | Cut stones – a round brilliant with its base disc, kite facets crossing it, and a small table on top. |
| Rainbow | The prism itself: a beam coming in, the glass triangle, and the spread of colour leaving the other side. |
Two different decisions live here, made by two different people. Whoever makes the theme chooses which scene belongs to it. Whoever uses the theme decides whether it shows at all.
Atmosphere is the last touch on a look you have mostly chosen elsewhere, so it is worth going back to the rest of it. I want the app to look the way I like walks through the themes themselves, which is where you settle on the colours the scene will be drawn in. Customize the Look covers the wider appearance settings, including the surface styles that decide how much of your scene shows through the cards. Set the theme first, then come back and give it its weather.
Available on iPhone, iPad, Android, and web at app.stash2go.com