Comments on: Make Your Own Screen Saver for Mac?

Question: Make Your Own Screen Saver for Mac?

fandango_matt — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 14:44:14 -0800

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.

By: doctor_negative

doctor_negative — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 15:49:39 -0800

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.

By: amberglow

amberglow — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 16:01:27 -0800

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

By: amberglow

amberglow — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 16:06:19 -0800

this one is free and plays movies-- xbMovieMaker - 0.2

By: Remy

Remy — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 16:20:12 -0800

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.

By: doctor_negative

doctor_negative — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 18:22:56 -0800

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.

By: fandango_matt

fandango_matt — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 18:43:44 -0800

Er, yes, I'm on 10.3.9. Whoops!

By: tellurian

tellurian — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 21:18:08 -0800

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.

By: AmbroseChapel

AmbroseChapel — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 13:19:19 -0800

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.