I think Twittervision, and Flickrvision are really cool. However, I thought, to be even better, why not have them as a screen saver?! So, last night I whipped up a MacOS X screen saver that shows these. You can choose one or the other, or have it randomly choose which one to use. This is literally a quick hack. I plan to add some other visualizations, such as Breathing Earth, and others (send me your suggestions).
Download Visionary Saver
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DealBase.com
54 comments:
Totally cool. I don't know what it is about Twittervision and Flickrvision, but I have always found them very hypnotic.
With the screen saver, my productivity is doomed!
Chris, your screensaver is awesome. I have a Mac Pro with two monitors and it dutifully puts up Twittervision on one and Flickrvision on the other. I will point others to this. I started to open Quartz composer to set up something like this but that area's not my strength. Thanks for a great addition to the family!
This is A+++! Would definitely download screensavers again!
Thanks!
nothing for old-fashioned XP...? *covers face in shame and tearfully misses stolen iBook*
(sorry i hate typos. deleted my other comment.)
This is absolutely brilliant. t/f-vision can now easily be accessed by doing absolutely nothing. And then I can carry on doing... errr, nothing. :)
Brilliant! Thanks very much!
Beautiful for the macbook. Please come up with something for XP - definitely need Flickrvision at work!
greetings from germany.
great work.
but it´s not running very fast on my mac (mbp 1,8).
I was just saying to my friend how cool these both would be as a screensaver and presto the very next day you do it. Now that's just trippy. What will you make tomorrow?
Love the IDEA of your screensaver. However, I'm seeing some implementation problems, at least on my setup. See this comment for details: http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/16/the-twittervision-and-flickrvision-screen-saver/#c4930806
Distracted yet? Try setting this baby as a background!
Type the following in Terminal (I have it as the alias 'background'), one line:
/System/Library/Frameworks/
ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/
ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/
MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background
/geek
Thanks for all the great comments folks. In terms of the speed issues, I don't know, is the straight answer. The screen saver simply uses a WebKit/Safari window to display it. From what I see, the performance is the same, or quite close to running it in Safari. I'm welcome to any ideas/suggestions for improving it.
Very very cool. I especially like having flickrvision on my main display, and twittervision on my 2nd display.
Would it be possible to have an option to have one on each monitor (assuming you have 2 monitors) all the time rather than just sometimes when on random?
Thanks for putting this together.
Chris and Dave, thanks for the comments about the multiple monitors. I'm traveling at the moment, but once I'm home next week, I'll be able to work on the multiple monitor stuff. That's a great idea to have one on each monitor.
Awesome screen saver. A suggestion, though, which will help performance. ... zoom the map a little further out, so it doesn't have to jump to a location. On a 2-GHz MacBook w/2GB of RAM, it still chugs moving from one side of the map to the other.
Excellent screen saver - now could I have one for my work PC ;)
@Chris, darn awesome screensaver! Looking at it on my 30" acd takes my breath away. Good job!
this is so cool, but unfortunatelly my emac is to slow (700mhz) and/or my internet connection. would it be possible to set a time for minimum display per picture, so it has time to load?
thx, bye,
chris
Many People ask me for a Flickrspy Screensaver. I'm wondering how you did the twittervision screensaver. that would be the same for the flickrspy, i could provide the online code if you could catch it. (http://leumund.ch/v3/flickrspy)
Great screensaver! Looks great on my iMac!
@leumund: I will add FlickrSpy as an option in my screensaver. I have a new version in process that also adds Twittervision 3D. Hopefully have a new version out within the next week (I'm at RailsConf right now, and busy finishing up two presentations, etc.).
For some reason the screensaver keeps crashing my System Prefrences window, when I click Test in screensaver settings window. Not sure why.
Hope I can get it up and running and see how the screensaver is.
Thanks
Hey this is a really great Screensaver. Good Work!
re: Slowness.
I use Firefox normally. Expanding the Firefox window to full screen, there is some SLIGHT stuttering, but it's hardly noticeable, and perfectly acceptable.
Then I started Safari, which I almost never use, and loaded Flickrvision on a max-zoomed window. EXACT same stuttering I see in the screensaver. It appears you're off the hook. It also appears I can't use your screensaver without stuttering, which sucks.
Possibly playing with zoom settings would help. I zoomed my Safari window out so there was no scrolling, and it was fine. Possibly a configurable zoom setting?
Re Stuttering, speed, etc... I'm hoping to work with Dave Troy to get zoom settings on the API so I can set the zoom based on your screen size, and work around the stuttering issues.
For all the folks who've asked for a Windows version... maybe is the best answer I can give. I rarely work on Windows, and haven't even unpacked my Windows box after having moved to Oregon 6 weeks ago :) I'll see what I can do, no promises, but watch this space...
Hey, Chris. Just want to add to the chorus here about how great the screensaver is. I've really enjoyed it for the past few days. The Twittervision part does stutter for me, so I just leave it on Flickrvision and all is well. Thanks again for doing this. I'll look forward to watching it evolve!
Marc :-)
Thanks for the screensaver!
Thanks for the great screen saver. I just posted about it at www.theblogblog.net.
I've developed a windows version at my blog:
www.victormartingarcia.com
I created a Windows Flickr-/Twittervision Screensaver, too. Sorry, Victor I saw your comment to late.
You can find and download it at: http://web2.0-central.de/flickrtwittervision-screensaver/
Chris, excellent work, since I'd never get around to going to Flickrvision otherwise. I've mentioned the screensaver in TidBITS; see "Visions of the Sublime and the Inane" at http://db.tidbits.com/article/9013.
One suggestion that no one else seems to have made. With the Flickrvision screensaver, it would be great if you could figure out how to do the mouseover so the pictures expand to a larger size. I can make it happen in System Preferences, but obviously moving the mouse while the screensaver is running doesn't work. :)
cheers... -Adam
Adam, thanks very much for the mention on TidBITS! I'm going to post shortly on some updates. I don't have a new version yet, but a lot of requests have come in, so I'm working on things (multi-monitor support, more visualizations, more options, etc.).
A lot of folks have requested the mouse over ability. I think enough now that I will see about making it an option. I just have to look into how to disable mouse movement turning off the screen saver.
Anyway, hopefully I'll have an update in the next few weeks.
How about instructions for removing this in the README file too. I installed it just to see what it was like after seeing some pointers, but I can't seem to remove it from the system.
Hi,
I'm interested in learning how to program an RSS screensaver for a Mac OS X platform. I need to know which development tools, programming language, etc.
I've created a short screensaver using VB on a Win2k platform with .net.
But I've been wanting to develop something for Mac for some time.
Will you be sharing that info anytime soon?
Jake
Jake, I used the Screen Saver project template in Xcode to get the basic framework. Then, you will need to write the code to do all the display, etc. There are ample docs on the ScreenSaver classes in Cocoa on Apple's web site (or with the documentation in the Xcode install). I believe there may also be RSS classes for Cocoa, or you can likely find something out there.
If you don't know Cocoa, and Objective-C, then you'll need to start by learning some of that. I would highly recommend Hillgass's book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". If you know C, or better, C++, then Objective-C is pretty easy to learn, and it's actually pretty cool (can't wait for Obj-C 2.0, which adds some great stuff).
U know what also would be awesome? This screensaver on Linux ;)
Any way to get a copy of the source. Seems like a good start for any number of screensavers.
Just joined Twitter a couple months ago and have been thinking Twittervision would be a great screensaver. Thanks for making it happen. Any way I can get you to update me when you come up with the new version?
Chris, that screensaver is cool man. Check out more Free Screensavers at this site. Loads of screensavers to download for free.
Note, there is a new home for Visionary, and a slightly updated version.
Awesome job man. I googled, I found. First search result. Many thanks!
Nice work. Thanks for the effort!
so great, thx. when is flick3d getter added?
Thanks folks. Matt, regarding flick3d, I have a few different visualizations I'd like to add. I've been super busy getting DealBase going, so just haven't had any time to work on this, but hopefully in the new year I'll do a cycle on it and get a new version out with some new visualizations, etc.
what about flick3d?
i would love this even more as screensaver than twitter3d
very good! thx
Sadly this isn't working on Snow Leopard - is there a chance of an update?
I will see about doing a recompile, etc. for Snow Leopard. I just got my copy of Snow Leopard, but haven't installed yet due to the fact that it sounds like it won't be possible for me to do an upgrade install, as I'll need to do a clean install, otherwise too much will break. Stay tuned...
Any progress?
I finally have a machine setup with Snow Leopard (as of 2 days ago), and will see how it goes now.
I suppose it's tougher than it seems?
Finally tried re-building this under Snow Leopard. It builds, but then the Screen Saver control panel says it can't be used. Probably some aspect of the build that is no longer ok on 10.6, so I'll have to investigate.
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