Written in October 2026, dated to the 1.5 release of 4 April 2026.
What the app does
Mandala Generator is a native macOS app, written in Swift with SwiftUI and Core Image. It draws mandalas from thin lines with a glow on a dark background, repeated around a centre. You stack up to five layers. Each layer has its own drawing style, palette, blend mode, symmetry and seed, and sliders for scale, complexity, density, glow, colour drift, ripple and more. Below the layers sits a background: a solid colour, a gradient, a pattern, grain, a picture, or a dark gradient derived from the palette. On top comes an effects pass: vignette, bloom, grain, stars, sepia and others. Every change renders at once, and a history lets you step back through earlier renders.
The image goes out as PNG, JPG or WebP, from 512 to 8192 pixels, square or cut to a circle, squircle or rounded rectangle. A batch export renders many seed and palette variations into a folder. An animated export writes a looping MOV or GIF with rotating layers. Everything is rendered on your Mac.
From 1.0 to 1.5
The first commit dates from 14 March 2026, version 1.0 followed on 15 March, and most of the app was built in the week after.
- 1.0 (15 March): the first release, with four patch releases on the same day. They added the background and effects cards, sample images and a fractal style.
- 1.0.6 and 1.0.8 (16 March): better stars, a new palette and blend modes per layer; then history, saving and loading settings, image export and more effects.
- 1.1 (16 March): WebP export. 1.1.1 moved background, effects and export into a left side panel.
- 1.2 (17 March): more effects and fixes.
- 1.3 (18 March): new layer styles, and the README was written. At that point the app had 27 styles, a custom palette editor, persistent history, batch export, animated export and an experimental drawing layer.
- 1 April: new styles and a text layer that can place quotes on the mandala. Some of the new styles were removed again the same day.
- 1.4 (2 April): a graffiti layer for soft spray strokes below the drawing layer; a colour picker per stroke in the drawing layer instead of the palette grid; a fix for streaks in text shadows; the canvas re-renders only when a drawing is done; a larger render radius for Deep Nebula; layer cards remember whether they are expanded. The same day, the release workflow started to build the app on every version tag with generated notes, and the builds got an ad-hoc signature because downloads had shown the “damaged app” error.
- 1.5 (4 April): a font width slider for the text layer, a tighter minimum for the text cloud, collapsible shadow and cloud sections, and a fix for a black border around text. The README now lists 33 styles in five categories.
How to get it
The app is on GitHub. Open the latest release, download Mandala-Generator.zip, unzip it and move Mandala Generator.app to your Applications folder. It needs macOS 14 or later.
The build is ad-hoc signed and not notarised with Apple, so macOS blocks the first launch. Open System Settings, go to Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway, then confirm. This is needed once. You can also build it yourself with swift build -c release and ./build_app.sh in the mac/ folder.
Open source, and favourites that travel
The code is public on GitHub under GPL-3.0, with an additional permission for app stores. The licence file was added in October 2026, when the Mac app and its Android port moved into one repository; the April releases shipped without one.
The Android port is called Dahlia – Mandala Maker. It reads and writes the same settings JSON as the Mac app, with the same field names and defaults, and its favourites file uses the Mac format as well. A favourite saved on the Mac opens on the phone, and the other way round.
The Mac app still carries the name Mandala Generator. At its next release it will become Dahlia, the same name as on Android.
