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.

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Source: http://codeintensity.blogspot.com/2007/05/twittervisionflick…

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Twittervision and Flickrvision are sister projects that mashup their respective communities in real time with Google Maps, providing a...

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Kenji F

Tried it on a Mac mini G4 (Plugged to my TV) and my PowerBook, and the scroll jumps like hell. Seems to be something related to the Google API. But, honestly, it looks way too cool on the TV. Thanks!

(It was time to change Flurry)

May 16 2007 at 3:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris Bailey

I am honestly not sure why it's slow. From what I can tell, on my MacBook Pro, the performance is the same or very close to its performance in Safari (which is essentially what the screen saver is using to display it). I'm open to any suggestions/tech info that may yield improvements (please post a comment on my blog (http://codeintensity.blogspot.com/2007/05/twittervisionflickrvision-screen-saver.html), as I may forget to follow up here).

May 16 2007 at 2:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

John Schofield

First, I don't understand the Twitter hate. If you don't like it, don't use it. But even if you don't use it, Twittervision is addicting. But Flickrvision? Who could hate that?

Second, I installed the screensaver and it repeatedly crashed System Preferences when I tried to run it. I rebooted after installing it, and that seemed to help with the crashing. (Possibly because I also disabled Twitterific.)

In any case, I got the screensaver running, and it was slow as heck -- the global map scrolled in S..L..O..W jumps.

I'm on a Mac Pro, with 2 3Ghz Xeons and 6 GB of RAM, and dual Apple 23" monitors. (Don't be jealous. My home setup is a single iBook with a 15" external monitor.)

May 16 2007 at 12:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

morgan m

please, no more twitter

May 16 2007 at 11:10 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply