Six controls, one menu. This page lists what each one changes on the Mac, what it leaves alone, and how the controls behave together, in the order they appear.
Where the controls live
Petit Fire has two ways in through the same menu bar icon. A left click lights the light or puts it out. A right click opens the menu that holds every control described below.
There is no separate settings window. The controls are rows in that menu. Every control is available from the first launch; none of them is held back behind a purchase.
Brightness and Size
Brightness sets how strong the light is. At the low end the glow at the edge is faint and easy to overlook on a pale wallpaper. At the high end it is clear against most backgrounds.
Size sets how large the lit area is: how far the glow reaches in from the edge before it fades out.
The two are independent. A small, bright light and a large, faint one are both possible, and they read differently on the same desktop.
What neither one touches:
- The brightness of the display. That is still the Displays brightness slider in macOS, and the two work side by side.
- Where the sway comes from. The movement follows the average brightness of a filmed flame that ships inside the app.
- The sound. Volume and Sound are separate rows.
- Your windows. The light is drawn over the screen and does not read what is under it.
Place
Place chooses which corner of the screen the light sits in. It moves the light and nothing else.
A corner your windows rarely cover is the easiest one to see. A dark area of the desktop helps as well, since a warm glow has more to stand out against there than on a bright background.
Volume and Sound
Sound is the on and off switch for the audio. When it is off, nothing plays, whatever Volume is set to. This is the way to have the light with no sound at all.
Volume sets how loud the audio is when Sound is on.
The audio is a public domain recording of a wooden-wick candle burning. The recording is 62.8 seconds long, and it is not repeated end to end. Each time, a stretch of 20 to 35 seconds is taken from a different point in it, the next starting point is kept at least 8 seconds away from the last, and the stretches are joined with a 5-second equal-power crossfade. A listener picks up a loop from a fixed gap between repeats more than from the sound itself, so the gap is the thing that varies.
On a new install, Sound starts switched off, so the light is silent until you turn it on. If you were already using the app before that default changed, an update leaves your own choice as it was. The row shows which way it is set.
Open at login
Open at login puts the app in the menu bar when you log in to your Mac, so the icon is there without opening the app by hand.
It does not light the light. Lighting is still the left click on the icon, whether the app was opened at login or later in the day. With this row off, the app opens only when you open it.
When Reduce motion is on
Reduce motion is a macOS accessibility setting, not a row in this menu, but it changes how the light moves. With it on, the fast flicker and the brief pop of a flame catching are removed, and the slow rise and fall in brightness stays, at half its usual depth.
It does not restrict any of the controls above. Brightness, Size, Place, Volume and Sound all work the same way with Reduce motion on, because none of them is a movement.
For screen readers, each row in the menu has a name, and each switch reports whether it is on or off as a value. The light is decorative and carries no information of its own.
Where the choices are kept
The settings are stored on the Mac and nowhere else. There is no account to sync them through, so a second Mac starts from its own defaults.
Besides the settings, Petit Fire saves one thing: whether the light is on. It does not store when it was lit or for how long, and the menu does not show an elapsed time. While the app is running it holds the moment of lighting in memory for the lighting animation, and that is neither saved nor shown.