The History of Screen Savers
At Tedium, Ernie Smith writes:
Having seen a lot of pipes, wavy lines, and flying toasters in my day, there was a real novelty to the art of screen savers, which became another way to put your visual mark on the devices you own. The animated screen saver is still out there, of course, but its cultural relevance has faded considerably. In fact, GNOME, one of the two dominant window managers in the FOSS world (particularly on Linux), straight-up doesn’t support graphical screen savers in modern versions, unless you’re willing to get hacky. And it’s not like people kick up colorful screen savers on their smartphones or tablets. But maybe we’re thinking about screen savers all wrong in terms of their cultural role. When it comes to screen savers, what if GNOME has it right?
Smith traces the desire to prevent burn-in on a CRT display back to the mid-1970s when automatic dimming was used in dumb terminals. The first animated screen savers probably appeared with the video game “attract mode” that played while an arcade or home video game was sitting idle. The article is a fascinating look at where screen savers came from, and the dedicated screen saver historian could unearth numerous articles about screen savers in the TidBITS archives. While I’m trying Apple’s Aerials screen saver (shuffling the underwater videos) right now, I always end up returning to Electric Sheep. If you still use a Mac screen saver rather than just letting your display go dark, what’s your current choice?
Are there two? I’ve used a screen saver named “Aerial” for several years. Its credits screen says “maintained by Guillaume Louel”. Has it been Sherlocked?
I have Aerial on my Macs although I have set the start time so high that it rarely shows up. On Apple TV the screen saver is a family photo album although the latest tvOS has made this harder to set up as I want it. On the whole, not a particularly valuable feature.
On my Macs, I’m using Shuffle All Aerials and have also checked the ‘Show as wallpaper’ box. This means that when the screensaver starts, my desktop icons disappear, and the wallpaper starts moving. When I unlock the Mac, after a few seconds, the screensaver stops and becomes the desktop. I think it’s a great effect.
On my Apple TV, I use the Snoopy screensaver.
I have a large [1] collection of Digital Blasphemy wallpapers, which I use both as desktop wallpaper and as a screensaver. So for the screensaver, all I want is to randomly display images from a folder.
MacOS has a builtin screen saver “Classic” that does this, but it has no settings other than the source of the image files. It changes the image to quickly for my taste. So instead I use ArtSaver. [2]
Which has its own issue: on current macOS, it can’t automatically update its database when new image files are added to the folder. I have to manually tell it to rescan. Yes, my automatic screen saver requires manual tweaking.
So I will award 35 Internet PointsTM to whoever can figure out how to script ArtSaver to periodically rescan.
878 on Windows, 794 iPhone, 783 iMac, 604 MacBook Pro â©ï¸
On Windows I use gPhotoShow for the Digital Blasphemy screen saver, I think because I can have it display different images on my two displays. â©ï¸
I’m using Drift with All Spaces on (can you set a different Screen Saver for different Spaces?).
I suppose it’s just habit to use one, as it doesn’t seem technically important to display life etc. Maybe it’s a sort of visual clue to me that I was doing something on the Mac, got distracted, and might need to finish it up. I’m usually not in sight of the screen for hours at a time so don’t use it for visual entertainment etc.
But wait a second, the Mac with the Drift setting was recently showing the Macintosh Screen Saver. Ah… Maybe during Settings review after the 15.2 update I changed it to Drift.
In macOS 15 Sequoia, anyway, Apple’s Aerials are the majority of what you see in System Settings > Screen Saver.
As I understand it, the one you’re referring to started as a hack to access the Apple TV screensavers on the Mac in an older version of macOS. It has subsequently evolved.
I use “Flurry”, which is included in macOS. I continue to use a screensaver for privacy purposes, to differentiate between idle and sleep, and for visual pleasure.
I still love screensavers… they are like art to me. I have them triggered after 10 mins (may change that to 5) and then I have sleep set to hit at half an hour. I found a collection of 250 of them called XScreenSaver. Here is the link:
My particular favorite if something calle Noof. I did install the whole bunch, at some point I may want to winnow that down a bit. BUT Noof is, IMO, the best of the best of the bunch,
I have a lot of family photos in Photos, and I’ve taken to having random shots cycle as screen savers. The bug with portrait format photos showing up horizontally is still a nagging issue though. It is fun to see a random granddaughter appear and try to remember just when she was that tiny and where the shot was taken. It would be great if clicking the screen would reveal info about the photo, but alas, that would be too hard for Apple to supply it seems.
The ArtSaver app can almost do this. It has an option to display metadata about the image, including the description. You can hit a key to toggle this off/on. And there’s another key to pause the screen saver. And you can use keys to move to previous slides. So: pause, then toggle info on.
I use macOS’ built-in Photos screensaver set to Ken Burns effect to cycle through a folder with my best aviation shots. Back when I used to have time for a hobby, I liked to take pics like this — or at least close (my friend took this exact one).
I’m using Scotland Coast. I don’t think it’s in the current OS version.
I use Aerial. Watching the scenery is mesmerizing.
I used to use Tom Dowdy’s DarkSide app on my Mac SE/30 and Mac IIci, from Mac System 7 to Mac OS 9.
http://www.poubelle.com/DarkSideDocs.html
Its VaseDance module was really nice, drawing symmetric random-walk-like curves on the display:
Currently, I use macOS-included ‘Flurry’, under macOS 15.3.
I use Aerial, but I sure wish there was a version of Delrina’s Opus & Bill that could run MacOS, iOS devices, and Apple TV.
Does anyone remember After Dark? It was a very popular screensaver way back when, especially the Flying Toaster module.
I still use PongSaver - soo retro
I recently re-complied it for modern macOS (under permissions of the origin developer)
https://mikeash.com/software/pongsaver/
Apple recently added the “Macintosh” screen saver (at least I noticed it recently). It is very satisfying to look at the old Mac iconography in glorious black and white, although other color options are available.
BOINC
I’m using Word of the Day in German. I took classes in German in both high school and college, but haven’t used it in ages, so I’m using what shows up on screen to refresh my memory. I’m also putting the various words in the definitions into the macOS Dictionary app to add to my knowledge.
However, I’m not sure that I’ll ever have a conversation in German about radium or similarly esoteric topics.
Similar to what Fred Brock and Simon do, I’ve been using the Ken Burns effect on an ever-growing collection of (now 1741) images (scanned and photographed) in my “Desktop Pictures” folder that I created in 2008. I also enjoy the random selection. As Fred reports: “The bug with portrait format photos showing up horizontally” seems intermittent. Sometimes the images display correctly and sometimes they don’t. ArtSaver seems like a nice tool, however, I like to use the screensaver as a memory jogger (and I’ve labeled all the images in the Finder).
Good suggestion Michael, thanks!
Oh, that takes me back!
But right now I use Sequoia’s Macintosh screen saver and wallpaper. It’s nice to see the screen saver change into the wallpaper when resuming work on my MacBook and it’s nice that the old System interface does show present date and time…
I remember it well. I can’t remember the name of it, but there was a game included that could be played while the screensaver was active, as long as you didn’t press any of the keys that would switch off the screensaver. Some of the modules have been ported for modern macs: After Dark Screensavers : Classic Set (Macintosh)
The first Mac screen saver I used was Pyro back in the 20th century - it was a fireworks display, and I loved it.
It was written by Steve Brecher, whom I had the good fortune to work with back then. He also wrote Suitcase for font management. And then he became a professional poker player ;^)
They were cute back in the early days, but for decades now I’ve used the routine to display portfolios of my images. It gives me a quick way to survey a group of images which might be being considered for a publishing project, or to show them to a client. Just push the cursor into the lower left hand corner, and poof! Sure, I could go into PS and run a “slide show” from there but that doesn’t fill the screen. And I don’t use Photos except on my phone, where I dearly wish I had a quick and easy screen saver based on albums, instead of having to assemble one and then lose it when I leave Photos.
All hail the noble screen saver!
I also use the ‘Macintosh’ screen saver, with the colour set to
Spectrum. It was added in the current MacOS (15 Sequoia). I love this both for its nostalgia and visuals (it has small thoughtful animations in a few places). The old iconography brings back a specific time and feeling when the Macintosh was new to me, personal computing seemed exciting and quickly evolving, and I had the time to get lost in customising, exploring, and reading all the magazines and books.My favourite was a screensaver that was called (IIRC) Mosaic. It took a photo from iPhoto, shrunk its size slightly then added extra photos to fill the black space. repeating as all the pictures reduced in size untill the original picture was barely more than a pixel - but in the process had created a brand new full screen picture from iPhotos.
I can’t remember when it disappeared but its not on my Snow Leopard system.
Shame. It was brilliant.
Aerial (to harness those Apple TV video screen savers on your Mac): https://aerialscreensaver.github.io/
Euphoria: WhiteBox - Euphoria 10.7
Hyperspace and Helios: nickzman (Nick Zitzmann) · GitHub
XScreensaver (that has already been mentioned)
Marine Aquarium (by famous artist Jim Sachs): https://www.serenescreen.com
If you try it, the latest 3.3 beta that mostly still works is here: Marine Aquarium 3 for Mac OS X - Inside: SereneScreen Fan Forum
I really like Marine Aquarium, but it has always made the fans of my MBPs (various models) run on high.
I can’t remember what it was called but we had one running on a server which featured falling cows. They’d fall from the top of the screen accompanied by a very distinct ‘moooooo’ and when they hit the bottom of the screen a comical ‘splat’ would sound and produce an image of steaks.
I guess we were easier to humour back then :)
currently my screen just goes dark. used to randomly scroll through album cover art but at some point, apple replaced that with their “sequoia sunrise” without ever asking. typical.
I used to run screen savers a lot, but at some point, I realized that there’s no point. They typically activate when I’m not in the room, and they keep the compuuter’s energy consumption high by keeping my display lit and by running code on the CPU. So today, the screen saver is configured to never activate, and the Energy Saver control panel will put the display to sleep at my configured interval (1 hour when on line power, 10 minutes when on battery).
That having been said, my all-time favorite screen saver is still the old SGI ElectroPaint screen saver. Sadly, SGI/Oracle never released the source code to the public.
Fortunately, someone in the open source community released ElectroPortis. He managed to disassemble the original MIPS binary into C code, and used that as the basis for a Windows app and a Mac screen saver. It’s not as good as the original, because he was unable to port the control panel used to tweak its parameters (so what you get only runs with the default configuration), but it’s still really great if you want something to stare at for hours on-end.
And, speaking of staring at graphics for hours on end, although it’s not a screen saver, I really like the visualizers in iTunes/Music. Especially the “iTunes Classic” visualizer.
Pyro! was a joint effort of Bill Steinberg and me.
Steve, thanks for popping up to make sure Billy gets credit!
Suitcase was an essential aspect of the early Mac experience, and I didn’t know you were part of the FreePPP Group—I think I mostly interacted with Steve Dagley. Thanks for all that.