screensavers
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Google brings its soothing Featured Photos screensaver to Mac
The same slick screensaver that brightens up unused screens with popular Google+ photos on the Pixel, Chromecast and Google Fiber devices is now available to keep your Mac occupied as well. With the newly released Featured Photos screensaver, you can finally turn your Mac into a photography gallery featuring some of the most highly rated shots from Alphabet's oft-overlooked social network.
Get some holiday snow on your computer screen
It's the holidays, in case you hadn't noticed. You've decorated the tree, hung some lights outside and probably have some LED-flashing snowmen somewhere around the house. So how about that Mac? Here's a look at some free and inexpensive apps that will give your monitor that holiday glow. Let it Snow (U.S. $0.99). A really nice simulation of snowfall with a real physics engine and gusts of wind. Looks great with the right desktop picture. LotsaSnow (Free) This is a free screensaver that makes every snowflake unique, just like real life. The screensaver uses a bit of processing power according to the developer, but that's the price for all those unique snowflakes. Live Wall- Holiday Season ($0.99) More than 50 holiday-themed animated wallpapers for your Mac desktop. Tired of snow? Try NightLights Desktop ($0.99). This Mac app will put Christmas lights on the edges of your screen. You can make them blink and control the sequence. For iOS there are some snowy options, but due to the way iOS devices work you can't get animated snow on your home screen. Snowflakes for iPhone or iPad creates detailed and non-repeating snowflakes in the app itself. There is an almost infinite variety of shapes and colors. A little off topic, but a fun app is Snowman maker salon (free). Strictly for kids, build a snowman right on your iPhone or iPad screen. Another cool app is Live Christmas Tree (free). It gives you a twinkling tree on your screen. You can also capture the image and use it for wallpaper, but it won't twinkle. Zen of Snow Lite (free) These are some really relaxing holiday scenes. Shake your iPhone or iPad and like a snow globe you get motion.
Top 10 subtle Mountain Lion features (and a few more)
Lifehacker has put together a list of what they call the "top 10 secret features of Mountain Lion." That's not quite right -- these features aren't secret, because it would be pretty silly to release an OS update and not tell anyone about it. But they are subtle, and this is a nice list of features you may not have noticed yet. For example, the fact that you can tweet right from the top of Notification Center, or that you can share photos straight from QuickLook using the Share button. You can also rename files in TextEdit (or share them to iCloud) just by clicking on the document's name at the top of the window, and you can even insert pages into PDF files in Preview through the Edit menu. Helpful tips, for sure. We'll even add a few more features in that you may not have noticed yet: Over in Launchpad (which you can access from your dock or pressing F4 on a new Mountain Lion install, or set up a hot corner for), just typing will start you on a search for any app you've installed through the Mac App Store. And you may not have noticed, but Apple's added some brand new Screen Saver and slideshow options for when your Mac goes to sleep. Just like Apple's other OS releases lately, there's a lot of new stuff to go find and play with in Mountain Lion. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Donate your (Kiwi-only) desktop to charity
Got a high tolerance for advertising? Want to give a little something back to the world without a lot of effort? If you live in New Zealand, check out Donate Your Desktop. Each day, the app will download a new image from a sponsor to your desktop. A portion of your ad impressions (75% of revenues) will be donated to charity. Recipients include Oxfam, the NZ Breast Cancer Foundation, the Starship Foundation, and the World Wildlife Fund. If you're worried about seeing hi-res photos of ill children or animals on your desktop, fear not. The ads appear to be tasteful, and related to businesses such as DineOut and Traff1k. The application supports both Mac and Windows. We were unable to test the software as it is not available at this time outside of New Zealand. If anyone from NZ can give it a go and do some basic assurance with regards to security, etc. please drop us a note at our contact form and we'll update this post with details. If you don't mind transforming your workspace into a daily ad, it seems like a lovely way to passively do a little good in the world. [via Springwise]
Daily Mac App: Magic Window
If you're tired of looking at that stale Mac OS desktop, think about adding Magic Window to your visual bag of tricks. Magic Window, available through the Mac App Store for US$2.99 (on sale) comes with 14 striking landscapes that change over time, so you see the skies change and the sun might rise or set. You get to control the speed, and you also can make the images black and white or sepia. Each loop contains about a thousand images. The high-resolution scenes support my 30-inch monitor without looking blocky. Once you have the app, you have an option to download more scenes at no additional cost. There are a total of 40 scenes you can choose from. They are grouped by themes such as mountains, beaches, sunsets and so on. This app is reminiscent of Sundial from Aladdin Systems, which was a pre-OS X Mac application. It's long gone, but the novelty of Sundial was that it tied the scene to your system clock so as the sun was rising locally, your screen was displaying the same thing. Magic Window doesn't do that, darn it, and most of the loops don't run 24 hours. Josh Michaels, one of the creators of the app, tells me that the app will eventually have that feature, which is most welcome. I'd love to see that. I like Magic Window. It gives my desktop some much-needed variety. It supports multiple monitors and you can have different scenes on each one. You also get the option to use Magic Window as a screen-saver, and you can randomly shuffle the scenes. Magic Window is also available for iOS devices, and we reviewed the iPad version last year. The sale runs until Dec. 29 when the price returns to $9.99. I'm hoping Magic Window will be updated with new scenes and features over time, but it's very nice as it is. Check out the gallery for some samples from the image collection. %Gallery-142103%
iSight Screensavers: Interact with your screensaver
Some of you may have noticed that some of your screensavers don't work after upgrading to Snow Leopard. If you're running a 64-bit instance of the operating system, you won't be able to use most of your old third-party screensavers because they're probably not compatible. Many of our favorite screensavers weren't working... so instead of waiting for the developers to release them in 64-bit, we decided to see what else was out there. iSight Screensavers from Majic Jungle (the creators of FluidTunes) isn't new, but it's something we've never covered here on TUAW. It was one that showed up first in our search and ended up killing our productivity for the rest of the day. And the next day. In fact, we've not really recovered productivity since we clicked the "test" button in System Preferences. Majic Jungle has made a killer screensaver that allows you to interact with different effects and filters using the iSight camera, or any webcam attached to your mac. I won't get into the countless scenarios we created (we're pretty easily entertained), but here's a list of interactions from the creators' site to help explain what it does: Fluid - Play with a beautiful fluid dynamics simulation Particles - Create magical looking brightly colored particles wherever you move Champagne - Immerse yourself in a champagne world and watch as bubbles appear all over you Fire - Set yourself or your desktop on fire - in a painless kind of way! Water - Ripples appear wherever you move Flipping Grid - Can you get all of the squares to flip over together? Core Image - Over 30 configurable effects using powerful Core Image filters iSight Screensavers is Universal Binary and Shareware. If you'd like to remove the watermarks, you can purchase a license for $4.99 -- pretty cheap considering my wife and I are more entertained by this than by a $25 night at the movies.
1001: A really cool Flickr client
The old adage that 'a picture is worth 1000 words' is still going nice and strong. Considering the sheer number of pictures that Flickr is hosting these days, that could be a lot of stories to sift through - why not try out a desktop app to help with all the work?1001 is a unique Flickr client from Adriaan Tijsseling, developer of the Mac version of blogging app ecto (the one with a slick new alpha version) and RSS newsreader endo. In addition to letting you upload your own photos to Flickr, I think 1001's primary appeal lies in its downloading and viewing abilities. It provides rich features for watching the stream of photos from your friends and groups, filtering the public photo stream with tags, blogging (of course) photos you like, displaying a Growl-like popup with certain photos you want to see and even using photo as your desktop wallpaper or screensaver. It's a really interesting way to interact with Flickr, and the only downside is a somewhat unique UI that might make it a little confusing to navigate 1001 your first time through. For a quick primer: 1001 allows you to pull down these photos by setting up one or more 'streams' that specify exactly what photos you want to see. You can create one stream for, say, just your friends (or even specific friends), and another for Flickr's popular Interestingness page. You can then toggle the different streams on and off depending on your mood, allowing you keep the streams from becoming a flood. Be sure to use the Streams button in 1001's toolbar, or check out the Streams menu to get started.All things considered, this really is a great app for Flickr enthusiasts or even newbies starting out. Once you get over the very brief learning curve, 1001 is a powerful app that lets you view just the Flickr photos you want and use them in other places on your Mac. But what does all this Flickr wonderfulness (hey, if Flickr can use pseudo-words, so can I) cost, you ask? Surprisingly, it's donationware, and I encourage you to show Tijsseling some appreciation if you enjoy 1001 and would like to see ist development continue.
plasq releases free Sqreensavers
plasq, developers of the hit Comic Life, have released a package of 10 screensavers for your Mac. They are funky, they are fun, and best of all they are free.Now, I know what you're thinking, 'who cares about screensavers?' This is a matter or personal taste, but I would venture that these are some of the best looking OS X screensavers out there (especially A shining).The sqreensavers (see what they did there?) require OS X 10.4.
