I’m using Word of the Day in German. I took classes in German in both high school and college, but haven’t used it in ages, so I’m using what shows up on screen to refresh my memory. I’m also putting the various words in the definitions into the macOS Dictionary app to add to my knowledge.
However, I’m not sure that I’ll ever have a conversation in German about radium or similarly esoteric topics.
Similar to what Fred Brock and Simon do, I’ve been using the Ken Burns effect on an ever-growing collection of (now 1741) images (scanned and photographed) in my “Desktop Pictures” folder that I created in 2008. I also enjoy the random selection. As Fred reports: “The bug with portrait format photos showing up horizontally” seems intermittent. Sometimes the images display correctly and sometimes they don’t. ArtSaver seems like a nice tool, however, I like to use the screensaver as a memory jogger (and I’ve labeled all the images in the Finder).
But right now I use Sequoia’s Macintosh screen saver and wallpaper. It’s nice to see the screen saver change into the wallpaper when resuming work on my MacBook and it’s nice that the old System interface does show present date and time…
I remember it well. I can’t remember the name of it, but there was a game included that could be played while the screensaver was active, as long as you didn’t press any of the keys that would switch off the screensaver. Some of the modules have been ported for modern macs: After Dark Screensavers : Classic Set (Macintosh)
The first Mac screen saver I used was Pyro back in the 20th century - it was a fireworks display, and I loved it.
It was written by Steve Brecher, whom I had the good fortune to work with back then. He also wrote Suitcase for font management. And then he became a professional poker player ;^)
They were cute back in the early days, but for decades now I’ve used the routine to display portfolios of my images. It gives me a quick way to survey a group of images which might be being considered for a publishing project, or to show them to a client. Just push the cursor into the lower left hand corner, and poof! Sure, I could go into PS and run a “slide show” from there but that doesn’t fill the screen. And I don’t use Photos except on my phone, where I dearly wish I had a quick and easy screen saver based on albums, instead of having to assemble one and then lose it when I leave Photos.
I also use the ‘Macintosh’ screen saver, with the colour set to Spectrum. It was added in the current MacOS (15 Sequoia). I love this both for its nostalgia and visuals (it has small thoughtful animations in a few places). The old iconography brings back a specific time and feeling when the Macintosh was new to me, personal computing seemed exciting and quickly evolving, and I had the time to get lost in customising, exploring, and reading all the magazines and books.
My favourite was a screensaver that was called (IIRC) Mosaic. It took a photo from iPhoto, shrunk its size slightly then added extra photos to fill the black space. repeating as all the pictures reduced in size untill the original picture was barely more than a pixel - but in the process had created a brand new full screen picture from iPhotos.
I can’t remember when it disappeared but its not on my Snow Leopard system.
Shame. It was brilliant.
I can’t remember what it was called but we had one running on a server which featured falling cows. They’d fall from the top of the screen accompanied by a very distinct ‘moooooo’ and when they hit the bottom of the screen a comical ‘splat’ would sound and produce an image of steaks.