Mac OS X Software

Useful (?) OS X software, presented for your evaluation and amusement.

Screen Savers

Various interesting screen savers, ported to native Cocoa for all of your screen-blanking needs.

OS X Screen Savers To install:

Unpack the binary version; that'll give you a directory containing the screen saver, and its (extremely minimal) documentation.
Double-click the screen saver, and let System Preferences install it in the right place, or
Drop the .saver bundle in your home directory under the Library/Screen Savers directory. You might need to create the Screen Savers directory yourself.

The older versions (1.x) of these savers are all compiled on Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"), using gcc 3.3. They should run on any version of Mac OS X since 10.2.8.

Mac OS X Universal The Universal binaries (2.x and higher) require Mac OS 10.4 or later and have been compiled using gcc 4.0. They work on both PowerPC and x86 Macs.

Thanks to Martin Brown for giving the Universal binaries a quick test for me!

Want to encourage me to make more screen savers? Send me $1.00 (or more, if you want… if you send under $2, most of the money is taken by PayPal's fees) via PayPal:

You don't need a PayPal account to use this service. I'll be using 100% of any money I get to buy Mac hardware (I'm coding on a 12″ iBook! don't look at me, I'm hideous!), software, and services.

Known Problems

For some reason, Rorschach is the only one that works properly with a multi-monitor setup. Specifically:

Noof — displays on one monitor only, the other monitor(s) are black.
Rorschach — worked perfectly.
Vines — crashed. No idea what's up with that.

Noof

You don't want this. jwz has ported the entire xscreensaver suite to Mac OS X. Download the Mac binaries from his website instead of using mine.

[Noof shot] A Cocoa port of the xscreensaver "Noof" module written by Mark Kilgard. Noof draws flowing rotary patterns using OpenGL; looks awesome (and hypnotic)!

Universal Downloads: [Source - 52k] | [Binary - 50k]

Legacy Downloads: [Source - 76k] | [Binary - 48k]

Version	Date	Description
2.0	January 12, 2006	Now a Universal binary (requires Mac OS X 10.4 running on PowerPC or x86 hardware).
1.1	June 1, 2005	Now works properly in Mac OS X 10.3 (and probably 10.2). This was ridiculously hard to track down, and ended up being some sort of project settings problem. D'oh!
1.0	May 11, 2005	Initial release.

Rorschach

You don't want this. jwz has ported the entire xscreensaver suite to Mac OS X. Download the Mac binaries from his website instead of using mine.

[Rorschach shot] A Cocoa port of the xscreensaver "rorschach" module written by Jamie Zawinski.

Universal Downloads: [Source - 50k] | [Binary - 46k]

Legacy Downloads: [Source - 80k] | [Binary - 50k]

Version	Date	Description
2.0	January 12, 2006	Now a Universal binary (requires Mac OS X 10.4 running on PowerPC or x86 hardware).
1.2	May 8, 2005	Minor bugfix for Tiger — the cursor will now be hidden when the saver is running. It's also explicitly built with gcc 3.3 targetting OS X 10.2.
1.1	May 3, 2005	Minor bugfix. Source now contains the proper copyright information. Nice new icon in config dialog courtesy of Geoff Holden.
1.0	April 28, 2005	Initial release.

Vines

You don't want this. jwz has ported the entire xscreensaver suite to Mac OS X. Download the Mac binaries from his website instead of using mine.

[Vines shot] A Cocoa port of the xscreensaver "vines" module written by Tracy Camp and David Hansen.

Universal Downloads: [Source - 49k] | [Binary - 45k]

Legacy Downloads: [Source - 75k] | [Binary - 45k]

Version	Date	Description
2.0	January 12, 2006	Now a Universal binary (requires Mac OS X 10.4 running on PowerPC or x86 hardware).
1.1	May 8, 2005	Minor bugfix for Tiger — the cursor will now be hidden when the saver is running. It's also explicitly built with gcc 3.3 targetting OS X 10.2.
1.0	May 3, 2005	Initial release.

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