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Four free Christmas screen savers to get your Mac in the holiday spirit
I love this time of year. I love the lights and the snow and the holiday cookies. I also love getting my Mac in the festive spirit. From widgets to desktop pictures to icons, there are countless ways to dress your Mac for Christmas. Here are four festive screen savers. Best of all, they're free. Jubilee by Idle Time Software displays Christmas or Hannukah lights like you'd see them if you were rocketing through your neighborhood in a Ferrari. There are four color schemes, including a beautiful blue and white Hanukkah theme. It requires Mac OS X 10.4 + (including Snow Leopard) and the Flash plugin. XMas Tree by Joe Hillman is an interesting 3D screen saver that decorates your desktop with textured ornaments. It's strangely hypnotic as the screen rotates around a beautifully generated 3D tree while Christmas music plays in the background. Mac OS X 10.5 + (including Snow Leopard). Silver Snow Clock is a simple little saver that shows an ornate pocket watch ticking the time away as the holidays pass us by. This gets a mention as one of my favorites because of the 3D snow that gently drizzles down the screen. Mac OS X 10.5 + (including Snow Leopard). Last but not least is everyone's favorite, Snowfall by Russel Warnebolt. We first reported on this almost three years ago, but it still deserves top marks. Contrary to popular belief, this screen saver was never used in Apple's retail stores (that one was, sadly, Apple-internal only). Since updating to 10.6.2, Snowfall experiences slight jitters. According to the dev: 'This appears to be a newly introduced bug in Quartz Composer on 10.6.2 that causes very poor frame rate. On 10.6 and 10.6.1 things are as usual, at least on my machines. Unfortunately this may require a fix from Apple.' Nonetheless, it's still the most beautiful Christmas screen saver I've ever seen. Mac OS X 10.4 + (including Snow Leopard).
Mac 101: Locking your Mac with a hotkey, like you can with Windows
One of the things that confused me the most when I switched to the Mac platform was the fact that there's no built-in way to lock the computer manually with a hotkey when walking away from it. This is something that was drilled into me from working in an office full of pranksters where leaving your computer unlocked was virtually a guarantee that you would be hosting a party for all of your co-workers that coming weekend. It turns out that this is an oversight in Mac OS X, and a 3rd party utility is required to be able to lock your computer with a hotkey. For a simple solution I would suggest installing a very basic preferences pane called LockTight. LockTight does exactly what you're looking for: assign a specific hotkey that when pressed will lock your Mac, requiring a password to unlock it if you have it configured to require a password to wake from sleep or screen saver (which you should). Update: Reader Chad reminds us that if you actually want your machine to go to sleep with a keystroke (as opposed to simply locking the screen) you can use the Option-Cmd-Eject key combo. [via Lifehacker]
Mac 101: SizzlingKeys - control iTunes with keyboard shortcuts
Controlling your music while you're working (or playing) on your computer should be virtually seamless. While these days it's almost impossible to buy a keyboard without media keys built-in, there are many users that either don't have media controlling keys on their keyboards, or would simply prefer to keep their hands on the actual keys. While iTunes is not capable of assigning hotkeys on its own, there are a number of iTunes controller applications on the market that can add this functionality. In my opinion SizzlingKeys deserves to be at the top of the list of iTunes controller apps for its simplicity, reliability, and extra features. SizzlingKeys installs as a preferences pane, and has a very intuitive interface that allows you to choose which functions to enable, and what the hotkeys should be for those functions. The list of things you can control with hotkeys is fairly comprehensive: Play / Pause Previous / Next Track Volume Down / Up Mute / Almost Mute Show / Hide iTunes, Playlists, Search Set song rating Show floater (song information) In addition SizzlingKeys offers some non-iTunes "extras" that you can control: Sleep computer Lock computer Activate screen saver The standard version of SizzlingKeys is free, but there is also a Pro version for $5 that includes the ability to skip forwards and back by a customized interval, the ability to toggle shuffle and repeat modes, and the ability to control the system volume.
Get into the Halloween spirit with a screen saver
With Halloween only a couple weeks away, it's time to get your Mac into the holiday spirit ... with a screen saver! The free Jack-o-Lantern screen saver from Killer Robots does just that -- without the mess of carving a pumpkin. It has over 25 pre-made designs, but you can also create your own pumpkin designs in Photoshop using the carving template provided by the developer. The screen saver features a very realistic pumpkin that rotates against a black background. You can control many settings including: seconds between pumpkin design changes, camera rotation, quality, and screen glow. In addition, you can select which designs you want shown. Check out our gallery of screenshots to get a feel for the quality of this awesome screen saver. You can download the screen saver from the developer's website. If you want even more customization, check out the Icon Factory's Halloween section for free icons (compatible with Candybar from Panic). Do you have another favorite holiday screen saver or icon set you like to use? Let us know in the comments! %Gallery-34299%
Terminal Tips: Make your Screensaver a desktop background
Have you ever wanted your screen saver to appear as a background image? Probably not. But if you like to show off to your Windows-using friends, then this tip can definitely help you out. By typing the following command into Terminal (Applications > Utilities), all on one line, and hitting enter, you will instantly see your screen saver displayed as a desktop background:/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -backgroundTo get things back to normal (which you probably will want to do, as many screensavers will put undue load on your processor), either close the Terminal window, press control + C, or restart your computer. If you are running Leopard and have the clock overlay active, it will appear above all windows, which can get a little annoying.Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and Terminal Tips sections.
Status Screen Saver 1.0
Are you so addicted to RSS, Mail, and Twitterrific that you just can't stand when your screen saver launches? Status Screen Saver might just be the screen saver for you. The awesome thing about this screen saver is that is displays your current unread Mail count, unread NetNewsWire feeds, and even unread tweets from Twitterrific. You can select a screen saver that you have installed in the Status Screen Saver options.Even better, Status Screen Saver allows you to (with some AppleScripting) create your own "modules" which opens up unlimited possibilities to what can be shown in Status Screen Saver. So, if you use something other than the supported applications, you can (if the application is scriptable) make an AppleScript to give a number, then place it in the Screen Saver.saver/Contents/Resources/ directory. Overall, this is a really cool screen saver which can be expanded upon by the user. You can download this free (donations accepted) screen saver by visiting the developer's website.
A dynamic screensaver, DIY style
Glenn Franxman at HackerMojo just put up a Python script that makes pictures pulled from MetroPulse into a screensaver. It's a mere 17 lines of code (which you can easily modify without knowing Python) that run as a cron job, downloading the images into the directory that you specify for the "Choose Folder..." screensaver. It's a simple, fun way to keep your screensaver interesting using a minimum of tools. There have been similar applications for services like Flickr, such as FlickrSavr or the screensaver that comes with 1001, but the simplicity of just updating the pictures in the screensaver folder is appealing. And a screensaver seems like a perfect application for my previous ideas involving mdfind and sips. By using the simple method Glenn applies in his Python script, and making a few modifications to the "Spotlight Gallery" Perl script, you could make your screen display the last 20 or so images added to your own system. That could truly be a practical use for the idea, depending, of course, on where the most recent images on your system come from. Yes, my mind just went there.
The Twittervision and Flickrvision screen saver
Twittervision and Flickrvision are sister projects that mashup their respective communities in real time with Google Maps, providing a (somewhat summarized) play-by-play world map of what's happening on Twitter and Flickr. While watching either of these services can easily become a hobby, of sorts, or even a great reason for your boss to hire you - why not blame all that wasted time on idle computing cycles instead? Dave Troy - creator of Twittervision - tweeted Chris Bailey's release of a Mac OS X screen saver that can display either of these services. Simply download, install and go into the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences pane to chose which service (or even 'Random') to display for your screen saver. Now you can allow either of these services to completely dominate your desktop, instead of living comfortably side by side with anything else you're doing that might actually be productive.The screen saver is fun and all (though I personally don't use any screen saver), but I was surprised to see that the scrolling animations were pretty choppy on my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM. I don't know if this is a performance issue with Chris's screen saver or the web services themselves, but I still found it to be an enjoyable unfortunate distraction from finishing this post.
Engadget's 3rd Birthday Giveaway - Engadget screensavers!
You know we had a lot of fun judging this one: for day two of Engadget's 3rd Birthday Giveaways we tasked you fine people with creating the best Engadget screensaver you possibly could. The overwhelming majority were Mac RSS reading screensavers, but we got some very different, really great entries as well. Again, big ups to the WMExperts store for providing the Wii and 10,000 Wii points to the grand prize winner! Now, on to the screensavers.
