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iSight Screensavers: Interact with your screensaver

by Josh Carr Sep 17th 2009 at 12:00PM


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.



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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...
 

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mech

I have been using this as my "security" screensaver at work, with a password, for a while. In fact I use this screensaver in combination with another one that displays various notifications (like new mail and how many new messages). This thing is definitely cool.

September 17 2009 at 10:58 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sine nomine

I miss my old neko screensaver. It has supposedly been updated to work with Snow Leopard, but it doesn't work for me. In fact, more than a few other screensavers that have been updated don't work for me in Snow Leopard. I wonder if it's an issue on the developer end, or if something is not quite right with my computer now...

September 17 2009 at 4:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MikeWard1701

Cool! I'd been wondering what screensaver to go for.

Was gonna go with an old favourite called System47 (http://www.mewho.com/system47/), brilliant LCARS screensaver. Unfortunately it's not been uptdated in a while.

Having seen these iSight ones I'll give them a try, though as you've pointed out prouctivity may go down :p


Regarding the iSight cameras, how well do they work in low light? I believe I read somewhere that they use infrared to enchance low light conditions.

September 17 2009 at 2:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
drakhul

Folks must be blowin up their servers.... I keep timing out.

ARGH!

Guess I'll have to actually WORK now.... DAMN YOU! lol

September 17 2009 at 1:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to drakhul's comment
rhodesy22

Google help out yet again:

http://www.fluidmac.com/iSight%20Screensavers.dmg.zip

:)

September 17 2009 at 2:34 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
brit67

I really miss FLIQLO, flip-style "pata pata' clock screensaver. Sadly no longer works under new Snow Leopard. http://www.9031.com/downloads/screensavers.html
.

September 17 2009 at 1:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to brit67's comment
OlsonBW

I still miss after dark. A REALLY old screen saver program from Classic (the '80s") days.

September 17 2009 at 2:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
valdar

Does this work with Snow Leopard?

September 17 2009 at 1:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to valdar's comment
Josh Carr

Yes, it does work with Leopard. Thus the discussion about 64-bit screensavers. ;)

September 17 2009 at 1:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ProfessorDex

They just made $5 from me!

September 17 2009 at 1:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jon

Check out electric sheep. I'm pretty sure there's a beta of a 64 bit version. Always used it on my pc and leopard mac and it's mesmerizing. The only catch is that you have to download "clips"of it to make it seamless. The larger library size you allow, the less repitition. Additionally, when the screen saver is active, it will continue to download and update.

September 17 2009 at 12:48 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
univac

Funny...recently I've been creating a bunch of iSight screensavers with Quartz Composer. Its not that hard to do and you can do some really neat things!
These by majic are really great!

September 17 2009 at 12:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Paul

Nice!

September 17 2009 at 12:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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