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Screen savers  3

I’ve never really been one for screen savers - when I had a Windows box I just used to set it so the screen would turn off after 5 minutes. That was until I borrowed Tugger’s iMac (one of the originals) and saw Bliss.

Bliss was a cool screen saver: first it would fill the screen with waves of colours, merging into each other; then it would draw waves in the opposite plane, bending the original colours new ways; some swirls would be added with a few other random patterns; and then the colours would pulsate, hypnotising you …

*blink*

Sorry, got lost in the memory then. Unfortunately they don’t do a version of Bliss for OS X so I’ll have to find some alternatives.

In this age of TFT screens, the need for screen savers is diminished as LCD screens don’t suffer from “screen burn” like cathode ray tube monitors do, but most users still have screen savers for the sake of nostalgia and for something nice to look at during a coffee break.

A week or so ago I downloaded XScreenSaver which is “the standard screen saver collection shipped on most Linux and Unix systems running the X11 Window System” that has been ported to OS X. There are over 200 different screen savers in the download and a few caught my eye.

“Boxfit” is simple: various circles (or squares) appear on screen and expand until they touch another circle (or square) and more appear, slowly filling the gaps until the screen is full:

“Noof” features star-like shapes that expand, move and rotate around the screen leaving coloured trails behind:

It’s my favourite one in the set and you can view a (very shaky!) movie of it in action:

If that video doesn’t work, try the alternate version (2MB, Sorenson compression).

“Matrix” is, as you would imagine, a stream of luminous glyphs and characters like the ones used in The Matrix trilogy - it’s the best looking one of the many versions of this I’ve seen:

Also worthy of a mention is “Hills” which isn’t from the XScreenSaver set. It’s an animation of some hills slowly gliding under the viewpoint - simple but strangely calming:

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