Happy to see people writing screensavers. In many ways, they’ve outlived their namesake purpose, but there is still something so charming about them!
I also recently wrote a mac os screen saver (for my first time) and unfortunately found that the fragment shader I wrote really heats up my machine.
They’re possibly still useful on display types that burn in in the modern day like OLED - and for people still on plasma and god forbid, CRTs, they still have a use.
Is a screen saver better than just turning the monitor off (i.e. turning turning monitor output off which makes the screen go into standby mode)? Are/were people using screen savers just to avoid the few seconds the monitor needs to turn back on or is there another reason?
Certain screensavers can help with burn in on OLED displays, turning the display off does not help. I don’t know the actual science behind it, I just know it worked on an OLED display I had that had burn in. ;)
Note that a screensaver is unlikely to have that property unless it was designed to. Those screen-healing screensavers usually use colored geometric patterns.
I remember one of the patterns in such a screensaver was a series of black and white vertical stripes that slowly scrolled sideways. I once had the idea of making a free clone of that screensaver, so I replicated that pattern in Quartz Composer, Apple’s visual programming tool for generating graphics. I never remade any of the other patterns though.
Happy to see people writing screensavers. In many ways, they’ve outlived their namesake purpose, but there is still something so charming about them! I also recently wrote a mac os screen saver (for my first time) and unfortunately found that the fragment shader I wrote really heats up my machine.
They’re possibly still useful on display types that burn in in the modern day like OLED - and for people still on plasma and god forbid, CRTs, they still have a use.
Is a screen saver better than just turning the monitor off (i.e. turning turning monitor output off which makes the screen go into standby mode)? Are/were people using screen savers just to avoid the few seconds the monitor needs to turn back on or is there another reason?
Certain screensavers can help with burn in on OLED displays, turning the display off does not help. I don’t know the actual science behind it, I just know it worked on an OLED display I had that had burn in. ;)
Note that a screensaver is unlikely to have that property unless it was designed to. Those screen-healing screensavers usually use colored geometric patterns.
I remember one of the patterns in such a screensaver was a series of black and white vertical stripes that slowly scrolled sideways. I once had the idea of making a free clone of that screensaver, so I replicated that pattern in Quartz Composer, Apple’s visual programming tool for generating graphics. I never remade any of the other patterns though.
Wow I love the Sad Mac screensaver. Using it :)
Right?? Sad Mac is such a great throwback. Makes me long for some pixelated flying toasters as well…
neat – too bad they are osx only! I’ll have to stay with bouncing cow then ;-)
There are really nice, thanks for sharing!