Lost Joys of the Screen Saver

I love Screensavers, and I still have them enabled on my machines. Typically, the screensaver kicks in about 10 minutes in, and the machine sleeps properly about 20-30 minutes in. Laptops on battery power are the only time I forgo them; choosing to go direct to sleep modes 5-10 minutes in.

I have (like many of us) written fun some Screensavers in my time. My current stock one is actually boring - it's a Windows 8/10 style clock and date (think the one on the lock screen) in white lettering, that floats around on a black screen. Simple but useful.

In the past I've written fractal based one, game of life ones, youtube streaming ones, ISS live camera ones (they've since locked out direct access to the feed - boo). I've wanted to write one that plays recorded footage of all the flight paths in World of Warcraft - like a virtual DroneCam - but I never seem to find the time to record the footage...

Screensavers are a lost art form, and I totally agree with the article.

As an aside, how many of us used to get annoyed when people said 'I've got that picture as my screensaver' when you know they mean 'I've got that picture as my wallpaper'? Grrr.

Screensavers are great. I spent endless hours watching Screen Antics (aka Johnny Castaway)[1], and the silly things he did.

But I also watched countless hours watching this art screensaver that came with my Canon printer (I think it was Canon). It just animated the painting process. I think it was called something like Canon Creative, but I'm not sure. I'd love to find that screensaver again - That'd instantly take me back 20 years.

[1] http://web.onetel.net.uk/~gnudawn/johnny/

I really miss After Dark. A couple are available (legitimately, apparently) through IIRC some Japanese site, though I recall the payment system being sketchy enough that I wasn't willing to give them my CC. Still, they provided Flying Toasters as a demo with the full version unlockable with a license key, and a little digging with "strings" and a write to a certain MacOS preferences plist later... and man do I like seeing those toasters when I come back to my desk after a meeting. Wish I could get the city skyline, though. :-(

Anywho, I really can't believe the whole package isn't on the App Store somewhere. I'd probably have dropped $20+ for the whole collection.

Aerial [1] for macOS is nice and quite relaxing. It plays the fly-over/aerial screensaver videos from the Apple TV.

Note that it does download a whole bunch of HD videos -- don't start this on mobile broadband!

[1] https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial

I still use xscreensaver:

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/

Note, there's likely some anti-link mojo there, so you might want to copy-paste that link.

The PC screensavers were naff and showed the level of imagination that went with the PC. In comparison the SGI screensavers were inspiring. Not only did they have 3D but they did stuff with that 3D. Meanwhile, on the PC with Windows 95 you had some annoying spinning text as the go-to screensaver. Even though you could customise everything about the text including colour and font, it still looked naff.

The SGI screensavers had authenticity, that teapot was no normal teapot, it was The Utah Teapot!!! Every screensaver had some educational aspect of maths or graphics that probably went back to some SIGGRAPH paper or Conway's Game of Life. The cheesy PC screensavers were tragic because people didn't know better, they had sampled cheap sugar not the golden fruit yet they were easily pleased.

Writing screen savers was a lot of fun too. There are some constraints, but you have a blank canvas. I wrote a rock climbing screen saver in the late 90s that used a very simplistic inverse kinematics model to animate a couple of climbers trying to find a route up your screen. I've long since lost the source, but it would be fun to rewrite, there's just nothing to target

Most of my coworkers are in their 20's so when they see 8-bit winged toasters flying around my monitor they just assume it's birds or that I am a weirdo.

(Btw, I found it within the first few G search results for "after dark mac". Not sure how legal it is, but I couldn't find a anything in iTunes either. There should be a gog for screen savers).

There was this wireframe rollercoaster screensaver that used to be available for Windows 3.1. Seems like I got it off AOL or Prodigy, or maybe even GEnie. It would only work on systems that had a math coprocessor (it worked on my -DX, but not my friend's -SX). I found that it you synced it up to this specific MIDI it would start and finish at the same time as the song, but for the life of me I can't remember what the song was.

It was amazingly primitive by modern standards, but blew my mind in the early 90s. I must have stared at that rollercoaster for hours.

I don't know why more people don't use them. All those digital photos we take, we get to watch them on a photos screensaver on a computer in the kitchen. Just makes sense to do that if you have a centrally located interface.

For some time, in a company where I worked, I used to have a screensaver called Mandala Screensaver. It was really colorful and good (IMO). Colleagues used to ask me for it.

Just did a search for "mandala screensaver" and got some results which look like it. Use caution if downloading from any site, though, and scan with anti-virus, etc.

After Dark was great too.

Earlier, Windows' MSDN docs used to have sample code for a screensaver (in C, I think), which could you adapt, and just change the graphics to your own. IIRC I tried it out some and made a simple one or two of my own. Good fun, and could be used for things like task reminders too.

While my laptop screensaver is pretty boring (lock icon with blurred wallpapers), I have a lot of fun screensavers on my Kindle. Turns out the Kindle supports PNG (with transparency) screensavers, with the catch that you need to jailbreak to set them.

I made some transparent ones that show the book text what I'm reading along with some fun text.

For eg, this one asks people to guess which book I'm reading: https://imgur.com/a/wIj4O. A few more are at https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/862587826801590273 and the files are at https://github.com/captn3m0/avatars/tree/master/kindle

I wonder if the old skeleton adventures guy ever sold a copy:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.415151.5...

...surely one of the last big budget screen saver efforts. (Anyone else remember Joel's BoS forums? I wonder if those moderators are still moderating.)

... but they live on! Shameless plug for the Electric Sheep [1] (no affiliation except as a user) in [1]. Electric Sheep is truly a 21st century screen saver as new screens ('flames") are created algorithmicaly based on peoples' up/down vote.

I do remember learning Macintosh programming by writing an After Dark module to display randomly changing Truchet Tiles [2].

[1] https://electricsheep.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truchet_tiles

> You can’t consume a screen saver in an instant. You can’t fast-forward or rewind one.

+1 for this. This is exactly the experience that Apple TV's screensavers gets right. They're just gorgeous, but they're random, slow, and you can't pause or rewind or fast-foward (unless you download the movies manually, which takes the fun out of it).

Johnny Castaway was awesome. I'd spend considerable time watching the antics. The other one I liked very much was for Win 95/98. It was set in a undersea coral 3D environment and the camera was fixed on a great white shark you could control. It was fun swimming and looking around as the shark.

Some of you may call me a heretic but I'd love to have the classic starfield simulation on my linux box.

If you want some nice screen savers that don't look like you're traditional stock screensaver, check out xscreensaver.

https://jwz.org/xscreensaver

Lost + Found: Screensaver- and demoscene-ish stuff that runs in your browser:

http://www.arscalculanda.com/

The GL screensavers are great, but IMHO the best is Pixel City. Somewhere there's an article about how the author did it and the choices he made to allow efficiency and verisimilitude.

I have always wondered - do Screen Savers actually save anything?

Do they save significant amount of electricity? Do they make the screen "last longer"? What was their purpose?

> The ending of Borges’s story, wherein the narrator is revealed as the slain minotaur of Greek mythology, only reinforced the connection; to me, screen savers have always afforded some tenuous connection to the afterlife. The first one I can remember, on my family’s household desktop, featured a crimson psychedelia that overtook the screen’s blackness, a kaleidoscope of paisleys and helixes forever in a state of irresolution. Late at night, I’d prepare an unhealthy snack and sit patiently in front of the monitor to watch it, a child beseeching death.

... what?

Johnny Castaway