Couple weeks ago Ben blogged about his screen saver. I see that screensaver in the office quite a lot and I’ve always liked the idea, but I can’t get beyond the horrible implementation. It’s just too pre-Jony Apple UI, all garish transitions, overly-formal grid and disrespectful resizing/cropping of the source images.

So I’ve had a go at making a nicer one. Used Quartz Composer which is a bit hacky but it works (just about).

If you’ve got a mac and want to try it, you can download the screen saver from Github (go cinecal.qtz, click the ‘view raw’ button and it’ll download the file) then drop it into the screen savers folder in your library (Finder > Go > Go to folder > ‘~/Library/Screen Savers’). You can set the images folder and adjust the speed using the screen saver options in system preferences. I’ve got mine running from an IFTTT folder in my dropbox.

Feel free to branch it or whatever, Guy’s already made a version that works with gifs. I’m sure it could be improved by being written as an actual .saver file (the options menus for quartz screen savers are shit and making a portrait layout has got me defeated) but learning objective-c seemed like overkill for something like this.

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