
Lost Joys of the Screen Saver - neonate
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/05/23/salvation-mode/
======
Jaruzel
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.

~~~
flashman
> a lost art form

Yes, totally, and one that only flowered for a quarter century! Although if
somebody released a generalised program that allowed others to create their
own screensavers as plugins, perhaps they could flourish once again?

~~~
criley2
I feel like screensavers and music visualizers are similar art forms, and both
flourished for only a short period of time.

I guess music visualization still has a niche industry in live performance or
creating video entertainment. But screensavers...

~~~
fl0wenol
I think everyone in this thread should familiarize themselves with the
demoscene
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene))

It's 30 years old now and still going strong, and it'd be right up your alley.

There's plenty of trippy, interesting, or technically demanding audio/visual
demonstrations for you to run, emulate, or just watch on youtube.

------
chops
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/](http://web.onetel.net.uk/~gnudawn/johnny/)

~~~
Jaruzel
Never heard of that one! I always felt that Little Computer People would make
a good screensaver, which is the same concept I guess.

~~~
duncan_bayne
Always wanted to play LCP as a kid, never got the chance. Should really fire
up the emulator...

------
ashark
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.

~~~
UncleSlacky
There's an in-browser CSS recreation of some of the After Dark screensavers
here: [https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-
css/](https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/)

------
adamzegelin
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](https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial)

~~~
callumprentice
Last year, I installed an older version of this and 3 months later I got a
nasty email from COMCAST telling me I was using more than a TB per month and
was going to get charged a fortune unless I stopped. It was really hard to
pinpoint it as the cause because when I was investigating, the screensaver
turned off. I think the newer version caches thankfully.

------
pronoiac
I still use xscreensaver:

[https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/](https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/)

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

~~~
puddintane
For the lazy: (this will hide the referral and not forward you to the image
crying about HN traffic)

[https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/](https://anon.to/?https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/)

------
Theodores
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.

------
pacaro
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

------
rlander
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).

~~~
cat199
XScreensaver has a mac port and an openGL toaster saver along with a lot of
other goodies, should you be so inclined..

------
peckrob
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.

------
quaffapint
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.

------
vram22
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.

------
captn3m0
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](https://imgur.com/a/wIj4O). A few more are at
[https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/862587826801590273](https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/862587826801590273)
and the files are at
[https://github.com/captn3m0/avatars/tree/master/kindle](https://github.com/captn3m0/avatars/tree/master/kindle)

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

[http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.415151.5...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.415151.56)

...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.)

------
JoeDaDude
... 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/](https://electricsheep.org/)

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

------
Osmium
> 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).

------
tachaeon
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.

------
cJ0th
Some of you may call me a heretic but I'd love to have the classic starfield
simulation on my linux box.

~~~
krallja
xscreensaver probably has it

~~~
cJ0th
Afaik it hasn't. Therefore, I look at some colored, randomly placed smilies
from to time time to elevate my mood:

function smilies(){ while true; do num=$(( $RANDOM % 80 )); for i in $(seq 1
$num); do echo -n " "; done; echo $(tput setaf $(( $num % 10 )) ) ; sleep
0.17; done }

~~~
nandhp
XScreenSaver's closest equivalent is "rocks"; you might try something like
this (unfortunately, when you ask for one color it's not white)

    
    
        rocks  -no-move -no-rotate -colors 1

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

[https://jwz.org/xscreensaver](https://jwz.org/xscreensaver)

------
muth02446
Lost + Found: Screensaver- and demoscene-ish stuff that runs in your browser:

[http://www.arscalculanda.com/](http://www.arscalculanda.com/)

------
jejones3141
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.

------
runn1ng
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?

~~~
discreditable
Old CRT monitors were susceptible to burn-in. Having a screensaver or turning
your monitor off when not using it was how you prevented burn-in.

------
nathan_f77
> 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?

------
basicplus2
Johnny Castaway

