Cocoa Screen Saver Prefs and Bindings (or Not)

In my latest work on my Visionary Saver screen saver, I had tried switching all my preferences to use Cocoa Bindings, to make it super easy to manage the prefs. After doing this, and having it appear to work, I realized that it does not.

The problem is that screen savers are supposed to use the ScreenSaverDefaults class to manage their preferences. This is a special Defaults class that namespaces a screen savers defaults/preferences within the defaults system, given that a screen saver is a bundle, and works within System Preferences (as opposed to being its own application). The reason it doesn't work with bindings is that you can't tell the Bindings system about ScreenSaverDefaults (to my knowledge), in the same way as you can bind to the Shared Defaults Controller. ScreenSaverDefaults requires a module name, and so on. If there's a workaround, I'd love to hear it.

I thus had to go back to manually getting and setting the preferences for Visionary. This did simplify one thing, which is the preferences settings for an NSPopUpButton, where the content values come from an array, yet the selection and setting should go to preferences. Personally, NSPopUpButtons, for simple use, are a real pain. I'm not an Interface Builder expert, but it's odd that you can set up to 3 values into an NSPopUpButton in the UI, as generic text, but if you want more, you have to setup the whole NSArrayController and its content array, and so on, then bind that to the popup, etc, etc. It's not awful, but the documentation is pretty weak in terms of a straight forward use of something like this. I suspect many other folks don't have complicated data models behind the values for some of their popup buttons, and a cleaner way to do all this would be nice.

Anyway, it's all good now, or well, it's all fixed up, and there's a new version of Visionary Saver out.

New Visionary Saver Version, and Updates

The Visionary Saver screen saver now has an official home, on my new (and barely going) business site (Cobalt Edge LLC). There is a new version (1.3) out, which mainly adds some additional visualizations. It is built for Leopard only, and will be this way going forward. My apologies to anyone running MacOS X versions prior to 10.5.

New Visionary Saver screensaver on the horizon

I've put a bit more work into the Visionary Saver screensaver, and should have a new version out soon. I'm likely going to have delay on the multi-monitor stuff. Getting all the preferences right for that is somewhat of a UI mess (especially for those of us who deal with multiple multi-monitor setups for a single computer).

On another note, I've added the "ThisWorld" visualization. Gary's FlickrTicker will be fully supported as well.

Depending on what work I get done on it this weekend, or in the next evening or two, I plan to have a new version out early next week, or this weekend.

Visionary Saver Updates Coming...

I've been swamped at work, so haven't had much time to work on Visionary Saver. But, I should have an update in the next week or two. Some of the things I'm working on:

• Multi-monitor support: allowing you to pick which visualization(s) you want on each monitor (or fully random)
• Adding a new Flickr visualizer: FlickrTicker
• More options for various visualizers
• Looking into enabling use of the mouse while the screen saver is running

Thanks everyone for the support!

In the mean time, to get the existing version, click here.

New Version of Twittervision Screen Saver

I've put up a new version of Visionary Saver the Twittervision/Flickrvision, and now Twittervision 3D and Twitter Flash RailsConf visualizers. The options panel is a bit different now - it's just checkboxes. If you want to randomize between different visions, just check which ones you'd like to randomize for.

I'm still at RailsConf, but will be home this coming week and can then work on settings for which saver you want to run on which monitor of a multiple monitor setup, so stay tuned.

Download Visionary Saver

Twittervision/Flickrvision - the Screen Saver

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

Technorati tags: twittervision, flickrvision, screensaver, mac