Story

macOS gives you three appearance options: Light, Dark, or Auto. Auto follows sunset, which is a surprisingly blunt heuristic. It doesn't account for season (dark mode at 3:50pm in December, light mode at 9pm in June), and it has zero awareness of actual conditions outside. Overcast and dark at 2pm? Your Mac doesn't care.

The deeper problem is that macOS treats appearance, wallpaper, and colour temperature as unrelated settings. You end up stitching together separate tools that don't know about each other, or you just live with the defaults and accept the friction. Solace tries to solve this by treating them as one system. It sits in the menu bar and coordinates sunset and sunrise scheduling, weather-aware dark mode switching, wallpaper sync across displays, and gradual screen warmth -- all driven by the same set of inputs (solar position, local weather, time of day).

The weather-aware piece is the part I haven't found elsewhere. It pulls cloud cover data and triggers dark mode when conditions warrant it, independent of the solar schedule. Right now the threshold is fixed at 75% cloud cover -- making that configurable is the next update.

Built natively with Swift and SwiftUI. All location data stays on-device. No network calls except weather lookups. No analytics. $4.99, one-time. Interested in feedback on the approach, especially from anyone who's tried to solve this problem differently.