Turn your Mac's desktop into an interactive webpage with the free Plash app

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Plash on Mac
Plash on Mac (Image credit: Oliver Haslam / iMore)

What you need to know

  • Plash is a free download from the Mac App Store.
  • It turns websites into interactive desktops.
  • Now you need never leave iMore.com again.

If you're tired of trying to find the right desktop wallpaper, a free Mac app has the answer. No, it doesn't rotate boring, static images for you – it puts the web on your desktop instead.

Plash can be downloaded from the Mac App Store (via 9to5Mac) and it's all very simple indeed. All you need to do is open the app's menu bar icon and give it a URL and it gets to work. You can tweak things like opacity if you want, and there's even a reload interval option for websites that are updated regularly. But there is no need to fiddle with any options beyond that.

Plash enables you to have a highly dynamic desktop wallpaper. You could display your favorite news site, Facebook feed, or a random beautiful scenery photo. The use-cases are limitless. You could even set an animated GIF as wallpaper.

Plash is going to work better with some websites than others, but it could definitely be useful for things like web-based calendars or sports scores. Whatever you use it for, Plash won't cost you a penny. And that's probably the most amazing part of all.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.