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AppWall screensaver brings the App Wall to your Mac


Even though I haven't actually seen it in person, I've been a big fan of Apple's App Wall at WWDC every year; they've hooked up a bunch of servers and Mac pros in order to create an animated set of App Store icons that shows real-time purchases in a very visual way. Now, I can have a little piece of the App Wall on my Mac at home; a Polish developer named iApp has created an AppWall screensaver that's now available for a free download. We got in touch with App's Peter Tuszynski who confirmed that, while it doesn't work exactly like the official App Wall (it won't show you real-time purchases), the screensaver really does pull icons from top free or top paid apps by way of an option choice, and then it displays those icons on an ever-changing screensaver display.

It's very cool. I downloaded it on my MacBook, and while the saver does take a little while to load up (it has to pull in all of those icons every time it starts up), it's a reasonable facsimile of Apple's official display. And you don't even have to buy tickets to San Francisco to see it! The screensaver is available for free right now. If the site's being hammered, just give it some time to recover from the traffic. There are also icons on the site that hint that Apple will bring this to the iPhone and iPad "soon," so we'll stay tuned and see what they've got planned.

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Even though I haven't actually seen it in person, I've been a big fan of Apple's App Wall at WWDC every year; they've hooked up a bunch...
 

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zackn9ne

dosen 't work . hard reeboot

July 21 2010 at 7:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jonty

Mine froze on 'loading' all the icons, which then required a hard-restart to get rid, any tips?

July 21 2010 at 11:44 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh Yates

Yeah...looks great!

However, it will not load. It gets stuck at the iApp icon and never runs on my normal screensaver. The spinning beach ball begins to roll and nothing happens. Runs fine when I test it through system settings, but nothing. I'm running a MBP 2.26 dual core with 4 mb RAM. Maybe the processor is a bit too slow? Who knows...

July 21 2010 at 9:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
TIm

My first thought was, that doesn't look anything like the app wall .. no color sorting, no falling effect .. but I went and installed it anyways.

Now I still think it doesn't look much like the real appwall but it still looks cool and I am going to use the screensaver for now.

Improvements would obiviously be to add both color sorting and the falling effect and use the real icons, not the weird squared twin version shown now.

T.

July 21 2010 at 4:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
MikeWard1701

Always liked the app wall at WWDC and often considered how cool it would be to have it as a screensaver, live desktop, or interactive version.

Would make a cool website, or storefront for the app store. Use something similar to Safaris' top sites view, with the Apple/iPhone/App Store icon in the center.

July 21 2010 at 4:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Andreas Heilwagen

DO NOT INSTALL! At least at my machine it did not deliver a single icon after 20 minutes on a very high bandwidth connection but locked up my machine instead with the color wheel. A hard reboot was required.

July 21 2010 at 2:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Andreas Heilwagen's comment
got nate?

it worked ok for 3 days, until i had the same problem. VERY BAD.

July 23 2010 at 12:33 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ryan Sandberg

I like it, but I want them to fall like in the App Wall. It might not be real-time sales, but I liked the dropping effect more than anything. Oh well.

July 21 2010 at 2:01 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
lens

I wonder how much power would be saved nationally if all computer screens went dark after 10 minutes of inactivity. It's got to be huge.

July 20 2010 at 5:54 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
drunknbass

the dev should open source this so it can be improved.. even if its just a simple icon mask ( :D )

i hate the hard corners on icon images.

July 20 2010 at 5:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Alahmnat

According to the creator's Twitter feed, it only works in Snow Leopard. Otherwise you get the "cannot load bundle" error that Patrick mentioned. Might want to note that in the post...

July 20 2010 at 5:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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