So, I was about 11 years old and just got my first Mac, a IIsi, and of course everyone had AfterDark, but there was this other screensaver program called "Dark Side of the Mac". And within it was, I think now, the most beautiful screensaver ever written. It was called Kaos.
Kaos would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to slowly iterate on a single image, starting with a few colored dots and growing into webs within webs of algorithmic beauty.
I'm not sure how Tom Dowdy actually wrote the program. What I've done here is to try to reverse engineer how it might have worked, but to animate it at the same time.
Freezing a frame (by clicking) seems to often yield something close to the original. My method is to cycle between 1 and 30 lines, with spaced out pixels, and then iterate the whole buffer to draw fainter and fainter points within a radius from any point that's already lit, while also amplifying the ones that were lit before and shifting their colors slightly at the same time.
Anyway, I did this tonight but I've been thinking about it for weeks, so, I hope someone enjoys it. Cheers!
I miss having a wide selection of screensavers on my Mac. Nobody's writing new ones that properly plug into the system screensaver framework, everything on the App Store is just a little program that wants to run in the background, almost all my old .savers quit working and the ones that do still work have terrible framerates, and the ability to cram a Quicktime composition into the savers directory is long gone. Having some bit of procedural art on my screen was just nice.