Save Your Screen With These Works Of Art

by , 11:00 AM EDT, April 29th, 2003

Everyone likes a good screen saver. How many times have you walked by someone's desk and found yourself stopped by a mesmerizing image undulating on the computer screen?

Of course, screen savers serve little purpose nowadays, monitors don't get burned-in ghost images on the screen anymore and the new LCD monitors don't consume the power that the heavier tube models do. So why bother with a screen saver? For the art, of course.

A cool screen saver is arguably every bit a work of transitive art as any static piece you might find in a modern museum. Sure, some savers chew up CPU time calculating and so on, but what comes out on the screen can be as engrossing as any Picasso.

Many have lamented that OS X lacks good screens savers, pointing to what's available on Linux, UNIX and Windows systems, Mac users often opine their desire to have their computer of choice display similar graphic slickness.

Well, you need not lament the lack of cool savers any more; there are actually several out there -- some are Open Source, some are shareware, some are just plain free -- that have been ported to or created for OS X, and they are guaranteed to stop passersby in their tracks.

Almost Shareware:

UselessSoft has several extremely cool savers, many of which have been ported from UNIX or Linux. The author/porter, T. Pecorella, only asks for donations of music, or a postcard, or some other eccentric doo-hickey as payment. Once you take a look at some of the savers he ported, you may just want to drop him or her a line, and a doo-hickey. Definitely check out Helios and Solar Winds.

Free For The Picking:

One of the best collections of screen savers for OS X can be found at White Box, a strange site that has some OS X utilities and other paraphernalia. Here you can find Flocks, Flux, and Euphoria screen severs, among others.

Those of you with ample horsepower may want to take a look at Alias|Wavefront's Maya Paint Effects and Fluid Effects Screen Savers. These savers will paint a screen full of leaves and branches, lilies, swirls, dips, or drops of blood. It's fascinating to see Maya do its thing.

There you go. Download these and prepare to be mesmerized. There are a lot of other screen savers available for OS X but these, as far as I can tell, are the cream of the crop.

Vern Seward is a writer who currently lives in Orlando, FL. He's been a Mac fan since Atari Computers folded, but has worked with computers of nearly every type for 20 years.