Make Your Own Screen Saver for Mac?

February 19, 2006 2:44 PM

How do I make my own animated screensaver? I have some graphics I've been using as desktop backgrounds, and now I'd like to make them into an animated screen saver. I'm fluent in Photoshop and Illustrator, and I'm on a Mac running OSX 10.2.
posted by fandango_matt to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Quartz Composer is probably the easiest way to do this. It's relatively easy to use and doesn't require a knowledge of programming to achieve pretty interesting results. It's file format will run as a screensaver in OSX. The RSS Visualiser screen saver is QC creation.
posted by doctor_negative at 3:49 PM on February 19, 2006

how animated? flash does it, i think

this is a hack in terminal, but not animated--maybe it can be tweaked to run animated gifs or something?

or something like this shareware thing? Flavorzsaver

or this for $30: iScreensaver Designer - 3.4
posted by amberglow at 4:01 PM on February 19, 2006

this one is free and plays movies-- xbMovieMaker - 0.2
posted by amberglow at 4:06 PM on February 19, 2006

Seconding Quartz Composer - I was able to throw one together in about 15 minutes of tinkering, with no documentation reference.

Of course, Quartz Composer does require you to upgrade to 10.4.
posted by Remy at 4:20 PM on February 19, 2006

Remy is correct, 10.4 is required to run QC, sorry. On the other hand, 10.2 is a pretty sucky version of OSX, so maybe an upgrade is in order.
posted by doctor_negative at 6:22 PM on February 19, 2006

Er, yes, I'm on 10.3.9. Whoops!
posted by fandango_matt at 6:43 PM on February 19, 2006

If you are just after a simple screensaver, you can always manipulate the images as you want in Photoshop and Illustrator and save them as jpg's to a single folder somewhere. Then in your 'System Preferences' under 'Desktop & Screensaver' use 'Choose Folder' to navigate to wherever your images are.
posted by tellurian at 9:18 PM on February 19, 2006

We've had some success with ScreenTime, which makes screensavers from Flash or Director animations. Not free though. Not even cheap, I'd have to say.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 1:19 PM on February 20, 2006