The History of Screen Savers

Originally published at: The History of Screen Savers - TidBITS

At Tedium, Ernie Smith writes:

Having seen a lot of pipes, wavy lines, and flying toasters in my day, there was a real novelty to the art of screen savers, which became another way to put your visual mark on the devices you own. The animated screen saver is still out there, of course, but its cultural relevance has faded considerably. In fact, GNOME, one of the two dominant window managers in the FOSS world (particularly on Linux), straight-up doesn’t support graphical screen savers in modern versions, unless you’re willing to get hacky. And it’s not like people kick up colorful screen savers on their smartphones or tablets. But maybe we’re thinking about screen savers all wrong in terms of their cultural role. When it comes to screen savers, what if GNOME has it right?

Smith traces the desire to prevent burn-in on a CRT display back to the mid-1970s when automatic dimming was used in dumb terminals. The first animated screen savers probably appeared with the video game “attract mode” that played while an arcade or home video game was sitting idle. The article is a fascinating look at where screen savers came from, and the dedicated screen saver historian could unearth numerous articles about screen savers in the TidBITS archives. While I’m trying Apple’s Aerials screen saver (shuffling the underwater videos) right now, I always end up returning to Electric Sheep. If you still use a Mac screen saver rather than just letting your display go dark, what’s your current choice?

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Are there two? I’ve used a screen saver named “Aerial” for several years. Its credits screen says “maintained by Guillaume Louel”. Has it been Sherlocked?

I have Aerial on my Macs although I have set the start time so high that it rarely shows up. On Apple TV the screen saver is a family photo album although the latest tvOS has made this harder to set up as I want it. On the whole, not a particularly valuable feature.

On my Macs, I’m using Shuffle All Aerials and have also checked the ‘Show as wallpaper’ box. This means that when the screensaver starts, my desktop icons disappear, and the wallpaper starts moving. When I unlock the Mac, after a few seconds, the screensaver stops and becomes the desktop. I think it’s a great effect.

On my Apple TV, I use the Snoopy screensaver.

I have a large [1] collection of Digital Blasphemy wallpapers, which I use both as desktop wallpaper and as a screensaver. So for the screensaver, all I want is to randomly display images from a folder.

MacOS has a builtin screen saver “Classic” that does this, but it has no settings other than the source of the image files. It changes the image to quickly for my taste. So instead I use ArtSaver. [2]

Which has its own issue: on current macOS, it can’t automatically update its database when new image files are added to the folder. I have to manually tell it to rescan. Yes, my automatic screen saver requires manual tweaking.

So I will award 35 Internet PointsTM to whoever can figure out how to script ArtSaver to periodically rescan.


  1. 878 on Windows, 794 iPhone, 783 iMac, 604 MacBook Pro ↩︎

  2. On Windows I use gPhotoShow for the Digital Blasphemy screen saver, I think because I can have it display different images on my two displays. ↩︎

I’m using Drift with All Spaces on (can you set a different Screen Saver for different Spaces?).

I suppose it’s just habit to use one, as it doesn’t seem technically important to display life etc. Maybe it’s a sort of visual clue to me that I was doing something on the Mac, got distracted, and might need to finish it up. I’m usually not in sight of the screen for hours at a time so don’t use it for visual entertainment etc.

But wait a second, the Mac with the Drift setting was recently showing the Macintosh Screen Saver. Ah… Maybe during Settings review after the 15.2 update I changed it to Drift.

In macOS 15 Sequoia, anyway, Apple’s Aerials are the majority of what you see in System Settings > Screen Saver.

As I understand it, the one you’re referring to started as a hack to access the Apple TV screensavers on the Mac in an older version of macOS. It has subsequently evolved.

https://aerialscreensaver.github.io/

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I use “Flurry”, which is included in macOS. I continue to use a screensaver for privacy purposes, to differentiate between idle and sleep, and for visual pleasure.

I still love screensavers… they are like art to me. I have them triggered after 10 mins (may change that to 5) and then I have sleep set to hit at half an hour. I found a collection of 250 of them called XScreenSaver. Here is the link:

My particular favorite if something calle Noof. I did install the whole bunch, at some point I may want to winnow that down a bit. BUT Noof is, IMO, the best of the best of the bunch,

I have a lot of family photos in Photos, and I’ve taken to having random shots cycle as screen savers. The bug with portrait format photos showing up horizontally is still a nagging issue though. It is fun to see a random granddaughter appear and try to remember just when she was that tiny and where the shot was taken. It would be great if clicking the screen would reveal info about the photo, but alas, that would be too hard for Apple to supply it seems.

The ArtSaver app can almost do this. It has an option to display metadata about the image, including the description. You can hit a key to toggle this off/on. And there’s another key to pause the screen saver. And you can use keys to move to previous slides. So: pause, then toggle info on.

I use macOS’ built-in Photos screensaver set to Ken Burns effect to cycle through a folder with my best aviation shots. Back when I used to have time for a hobby, I liked to take pics like this — or at least close (my friend took this exact one).

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I’m using Scotland Coast. I don’t think it’s in the current OS version.

I use Aerial. Watching the scenery is mesmerizing.

I used to use Tom Dowdy’s DarkSide app on my Mac SE/30 and Mac IIci, from Mac System 7 to Mac OS 9.
http://www.poubelle.com/DarkSideDocs.html

Its VaseDance module was really nice, drawing symmetric random-walk-like curves on the display:

VaseDance
Charlie Reiman wrote this really neat little fader. Source code for this
fader is available from Charlie himself those of you with network access
can contact him that way.

Currently, I use macOS-included ‘Flurry’, under macOS 15.3.

I use Aerial, but I sure wish there was a version of Delrina’s Opus & Bill that could run MacOS, iOS devices, and Apple TV.

Does anyone remember After Dark? It was a very popular screensaver way back when, especially the Flying Toaster module.

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I still use PongSaver - soo retro :slight_smile:
I recently re-complied it for modern macOS (under permissions of the origin developer)
https://mikeash.com/software/pongsaver/

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Apple recently added the “Macintosh” screen saver (at least I noticed it recently). It is very satisfying to look at the old Mac iconography in glorious black and white, although other color options are available.

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BOINC

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