It is possible to use a program like Flash Forge to create screensavers instead of searching for and downloading them on the Internet. Flash Forge can turn Flash files, those with the swf extension, into screensavers with just a few mouse clicks.

The program will convert the flash file that is being supplied by the user into an executable that will install the screensaver when executed. The user has the option to add multiple files to the screensaver, e.g. to add multiple movies that are played after each other. The installation program can be compressed to reduce the size of it which is useful if web distribution or network distribution is an issue.

Actions after the installation can be defined to show a readme file, open the display properties or start the screensaver automatically. Many users might probably want to turn Flash videos that they have downloaded from Youtube or other video sites into screensavers. These files cannot be loaded into the program right away. Conversion services, like the free Media Convert, can turn the flv files into swf format so that they can be loaded into Flash Forge.

The output quality depends largely on the input file. The screensaver creator has been primarily designed with non-interactive content in mind (movies or images) and won’t work that well with interactive Flash files like games. Interested users can download Flash Forge from the developer’s website. It should be compatible with most versions of Microsoft Windows. It was tested on Windows XP.

• xscreensaver
• gnome-screensaver
• kscreensaver

Obviously gnome-screensaver and kscreensaver are for GNOME and KDE (respecively). The xscreensaver package, however, is a much generic package that any Linux distribution, so long as it is running X, can use. That is what we are going to discuss.

What is xscreensaver?

The xscreensaver package does not only come with a collection of screensavers but also the framework necessary to blank and locking the screen. It was originally released in 1992 and is still going strong today.

There are different types of screensavers to use with xscreensaver. The type you can use will depend upon your installation and hardware. If you have OpenGL working properly on your system then you can make use of the collection of 3D screensavers. If not then you will be relegated to the standard 2D screensavers.

Getting and installing

As you would expect, xscreensaver, and all of its data, can be found in your distribution’s repositories. Chances are your distribution installed, at minimum, the xscreensaver package when you installed your system. You will know this for sure when you go to install.

Fire up your Add/Remove Software utility and do a search for “xsreensaver”. You will see, included in your full search results, the following packages:

• xscreensaver: The base package
• xscreensaver-data: A portion of the screensavers used by both xscreensaver and gnome-screensaver
• xscreensaver-data-extra: The remainder of the 2D screensavers
• xscreensaver-gl: A small portion of the 3D screensavers
• xscreensaver-gl-extra: The remainder of the 3D screensavers

Select at least the first three listed above. If you know your machine has GL installed and working, install the remaining applications.

Running and configuring

Once everything is installed you are ready to run. You should find the xscreensaver application in your Preferences menu (depending upon which desktop you are using.) If you can not find the menu entry you can issue the command:

screensaver-manager

which will open up the screensaver management window (see Figure 1). When this window opens a smaller window will also appear informing you the xscreensaver daemon is not running. This will only happen when you first run this (or until you kill the daemon or reboot your machine.)

Figure 1

In this main window you will see there are a number of configuration options to take care of. The Display modes tab is where you configure the screensaver you want to use and how soon you want the screen to blank. If you choose more than one screen saver (or choose Random) the Cycle After configuration will set how long before the screensaver changes.

How many screensavers are listed in the window will depend upon how many of the packages you installed. In Figure 1 you can see the Lament GL screensaver. This particular screensaver is packaged with the xsreensaver-gl-extra package.

Depending upon the screensaver you choose you might have settings that are available. If this is the case a Settings button will appear in the main window. You will also notice a Preview button which allows you to see what your screensaver will look like in fullscreen mode (you get a tiny preview of the working screensaver in a window in the xscreensaver main window.)

The advanced configuration tab allows you to take care of:

• Image manipulation: Where your screensaver will get images from if needed.
• Text manipulation: Where your screensaver will get text from if needed.
• Power management: Standby, suspend, and off settings.
• Fading and colormaps: Fade to and from settings.

Once you have configured all you need in the management tool you can just close it by clicking File and then Quit. From this same menu you can also:

• Immediately blank or lock the screen
• Kill or restart the xscreensaver daemon

Final thoughts

There are over 200 collected screensavers in the collected xscreensaver packages. You will most likely find a screensaver that suites your needs here. No, you can not install that latest piece of work from the SyFy channel or from E! magazine, but you can find plenty to use and they will do their job well.

The homepage does not contain information about the criteria that are applied by the Twitter screensaver. The screensaver will display an image once it gets turned on. The major part of the screen is reserved for the image while a smaller strip on the bottom is reserved for the name of the Twitter user and the message send by that user.

Images are rotated every 30 seconds automatically. This basically means that a new image and message are displayed every 30 seconds while the Twitter screensaver is running. The screensaver requires an Internet connection to pull the data from Twitter.

The major drawback of Twitsaver is that it does not offer customizations. It is not possible to change the frequency or specify certain Twitter users that should be used exclusively.

That could pose an excellent idea to use the screensaver as a photo wall. The display is automatically changing every 30 seconds. This can be changed in the options as well.

The screensaver software comes with the ability to add quotes automatically to each photo set. Quotes are taken from so called quote books. Five of them are installed on the computer during the screensaver installation. Those books are simple text files that contain one quote a line. It is therefor easy to add a custom quote book or edit existing ones.

The options of the screensaver are quite extensive. The program offers extensive options to configure the display of the quotes and images. This ranges from selecting the right fonts for the quotes to configuring minimum and maximum sizes for photos on the screen.

One main application for Multi Photo Quotes could be to install them on family computers to display family photos (and quotes) whenever the screensaver becomes active.

Screensavers nowadays are more for showing off than to really save the computer screen. Many users prefer to turn off the computer monitor whenever they will leave the workspace for a longer period of time.

Still, if you like screensavers you might fall in love with the ones listed below. If you got or know of an extraordinarily cool nerdy screenshot let me know in the comments.

TwittEarth (Windows XP, Mac coming soon)

A Twitter world map mashup. The screensaver is displaying Twitter messages of random Twitter users in their correct location on the world map. Each user is displayed as a avatar on the world map which gets crowded pretty fast.

Mapped Up (Windows, Mac OS X)

Unfortunately dead since 2006 a screensaver at least what’s the latest blog post dating back to Aug 18, 2006 suggests. The screensaver is displaying a world map RSS feeds mashup that is showing updated news in the world. The original website allowed for customization for registered users. Registration is unfortunately not enabled anymore. The default news on the other hand are still displayed fine in the screensaver.

You can use the mouse to hover an entry to read the title. Clicking on a title will load the news item in the default web browser.

Twingly Screensaver

A visualization of the state of the blogosphere according to Twingly. If that does not sound nerdy enough I do not know what does. Twingly is a blog search engine. The screensaver displays updated blog posts in real time. It comes with an interactive mode which gives the user more control over the items and enough time to actually read what it happening.

System 47 (Windows, Mac OS X)

It is pretty common knowledge that Star Trek fans are some of the nerdiest humans in this planet. System 47 should be the best possible screensaver for their computer systems. It comes with sounds and all kind of schematics that they will surely love.

Cities of Earth

Geography seems to be another favorite topic among nerds. The Cities of Earth screensaver displays a wonderful rotating real time image of earth. It highlights cities on the planet and provides basic information such as names and the population count.

Screen2Dream is a portable application for Windows XP or Windows Vista that requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0. The software program will automatically provide the means to turn any installed system screensaver into an animated desktop wallpaper.

This is done by pressing by selecting one of the available screensavers and pressing the start button in the program’s interface afterwards. Each screensaver is shown in a small preview window in the interface as well to aid the user in the decision.

Unlike a screensaver the animated desktop wallpaper will continue to be shown even if the user starts working with the computer again. Pressing the stop button in the application will turn the animated desktop wallpaper off and display the previous desktop background again. The only other option provided in the interface is to start the application with Windows.

The Wikiquote Screensaver makes use of yet another Wikipedia site but gives the user more control over what is actually displayed when the screensaver activates. Wikiquotes provides access to a large collection of quotations in several languages.

The screensaver makes use of an interface that can be used to add quotes to the screensaver. At least one quote has to be added before the screensaver starts working at all. This is done by searching for a name or term. A list of matches will then be displayed. By default all are selected to be added to the screensaver’s rotation.

The quotes that have been selected have to be saved in the end. Once that is done they will be displayed when the screensaver becomes active.

The screensaver requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 to function. The pack can be downloaded from Microsoft.

What’s your favorite quote? Let me know..

This hidden setting works in all versions and editions of Windows Vista. All that needs to be done is to execute a single command to execute the screensaver as the Vista wallpaper. The best method is to test run the feature with the default screensavers that are shipped with Windows Vista and use custom ones after making sure that everything is still working properly.

Open a command prompt by pressing Windows R and typing in cmd. Now execute the command aurora.scr /p65552. It can take a few seconds before the changes become apparent. What you should see is the screensaver as the new wallpaper in Windows Vista.

The above screenshot is a snapshot of a Windows Vista 32-bit Home Premium edition running the pc screensaver Analogy as the background image. The screensaver can be killed anytime in the Windows Task Manager where it appears as a process that uses roughly 10 Megabytes of computer memory.

The only side effect of the procedure is that all desktop icons will be hidden for as long as the screensaver is running as the background image.

The Wikipedia Screensaver displays random Wikipedia pages which are replaced in intervals that the user can define. The screensaver makes use of Internet Explorer to display the Wikipedia page in fullscreen on the monitor.

The screensaver can be configured to kill any application or processes that are still running on the system. The question about the usefulness of this screensaver has to be answered by every user individually. I personally cannot really see a reason to use the screensaver. It does not make much sense to display the pages when the user is sitting on the desk while they also do not make sense when the user is not that close to his desktop.

It could be useful to show others that you are a clever guy though. Let me know if you find some use for this screensaver. The screensaver requires the Microsoft .net Framework 1.1.

The PC screensaver Analogy (via Lost in Technology) by Jesson Yip provides strong visual elements. The basic idea is to display a analog-digital clock hybrid which combines the aesthetic visuals with the functionality of a clock or as the developer put it “Analogy is a typographic clock which fuses the immediacy of digital with the visual-spatial quality of analogue into a hybrid format.”

The screensaver comes as an executable that installs the screensaver automatically during installation. The Pc screensaver takes the information from the system clock and displays the hours, minutes and seconds and their progression.

The PC screensaver comes in two versions. The default version uses a black screen while the other version a white one. There is no other difference between the two screensaver versions.

Computers can go to sleep as well as we all know. They can fire up a screensaver or go to sleep by turning off the monitor completely and Caffeine is a software that can prevent this from happening by simulating a keystroke every 59 seconds.

The default value can be changed to a keystroke every x seconds instead. To prevent problems with running applications the software simulates a shift-down, shift-up keystroke in Windows 98 and a shift-down keystroke in Windows XP and 2000.

The software has a size of only 11 Kilobytes and could be useful if your computer falls asleep every now and then. On the other hand the sleep and screensaver intervals can be changed as well or turned off. Still nice to have a coffee cup sitting in the system tray.

And then there is the possibility of the drinking bird that presses a key for you just like Homer did in the King-Size Homer episode of the Simpsons.

Today’s monitors however are not prone to those burn-ins which makes screensavers for that purpose obsolete. If you want to save energy you should therefor turn off the monitor. I have set the Energy Saving options to turn off the monitor after fifteen minutes of inactivity.

Moving the mouse turns the monitor on again and work can resume afterwards. Screensavers these days serve mainly two purposes. The first is entertainment. A wide variety of possibilities exist including video screensavers, virtual tours or graphic demos. The second is a basic protection of the computer which can be configured to ask for the user password before work can commence.

How is your computer configured to handle inactivity ?

Still I do come frequently upon screensavers that stick out, that are to cool to ignore. The Dropclock screensaver is one of those which does become apparent when you take a look at the size of it. Dropclock has a size of 136 Megabytes ! Now that’s a huge screensaver.

It’s available for Windows XP, Windows Vista with .net framework 1.1 and MAC OSX 10.33 – 10.5. The screensaver is free to try but actually costs $15 which can be paid using Paypal. I’m not sure if the free version is limited because there is no information on the website about it.

I was not able to discover any limitations so far. There are not options available though.

And so the idea was born to create a screensaver from a Youtube video. I really like the Amiga Longplay series at Youtube, where guys play old Amiga classic games. The videos show all of the game and have a playtime of many hours sometimes. I decided to download several of those videos, namely King of Chicago, Moonstone, Indiana Jones IV and Day of the Tentacle (PC) and create screensavers from them.

I’m using the Firefox Download Helper extension to download the videos from Youtube. You could also use Grab++ from Orbit Downloader or any other means of downloading the videos from Youtube. The videos are still in flv format and we need to use a converter to convert them to swf format.

I have been using a website called Media Convert to convert flv to swf files. It supports files with a size of up to 150 Megabyte.

If you prefer a offline application or have flv files with a size larger than 150 Megabyte you could use Super instead. Super is a media converter supporting most media file formats. It’s also a better idea if your upload speed is rather low.

Once the swf file has been created you can load Instant Storm and the creation of the screensaver from that Youtube video begins. The process is actually pretty straightforward. I have been using the Project Wizard which guides you to three steps.

The steps are to (1) name the screensaver, (2) select the swf file for it, (3) add a preview image if you like and (4) convert the swf file to the screensaver. A .exe file will be created which, when double-clicked, becomes the new screensaver for the system.

What I like about this solution is that you create a screensaver with video and sound. The process is really easy to follow through and you get some very nice results. It’s actually fun watching the screensaver for some time.

This technique is not limited to Youtube videos. You can basically convert any video files to swf files and create a screensaver from them using this method.

A default panorama will be shown and the user has the chance to configure the parameters. This is useful for instance to regulate the scrolling speed and time. Additional panoramas can be downloaded from the program homepage but also from other sources on the Internet. This does not pose a problem at all because WPanorama uses normal image formats to display and scroll the panoramas.

The screensaver is automatically enabled during installation and offers several impressive features that make the software worthwhile. You can add images to a list which the program will then load either sequentially or randomly.

Images on the homepage are available in high resolutions of up to 10332×768 and 1024×9216 pixels. You find images from all over the world with a concentration on Switzerland.

Installation and configuration is a matter of seconds. Just download My Pictures 3D and install it on your computer. Open the configuration afterwards, select a virtual tour and add pictures from your hard drive to it. Additional tours can be downloaded and installed from the developers homepage, all free of charge of course.

Users can add mp3 sounds as well to make the experience even more realistic. Several other options include picture quality settings and walker speed and height.

I suggest you test the settings after selecting the virtual tour and adding pictures by right-clicking your desktop, selecting Properties and clicking on the Scree Saver tab in the menu. Click on the preview button in that menu and don’t move the mouse afterwards. The virtual tour should start and you can check if everything looks like it should.

The Flickr api key can be added in the settings of Slickr and this is also the place where you customize the software. It is possible to display images of a specific user, a group, from everyone with the possibility to customize this request further by selecting Recent pictures, tagged pictures or Interestingness. Last but not least it is possible to use a local folder instead and display the pictures of that folder instead.

This is however not all that can be customized. You can select a minimum width and heights, a maximum size, the time between picture changes, size of the cache and several other settings.

Slickr will automatically add itself as the screensaver in Windows if you select the Screensaver option from the start menu.

They have a big thread running at the moment discussing small, cool and lightweight screensavers and Flurry was mentioned in that thread among others. Flurry is only 57K in size, probably the smallest screensaver ever. Windows users simply double-click the .src file and setup Flurry by pressing the settings button.

Flurry is also available for Mac here and I suppose it offers the same features as the Windows version. I will still stick with my initial stance and turn of the monitor automatically if I have been idle for more than 10 minutes, everyone else who is using screensavers should definitely try Flurry. Take a look at the screenshot below to get an impression about Flurry:

The Microsoft Video Screensaver should work on all versions of Windows XP and includes one video from Microsoft. You can choose to use one or more of the videos located on your computer instead. You do this by pointing to a folder that contains at least one video.

The video screensaver seems to support more than just wmv files. I was able to successfully load avi videos for instance.

If more than one video is found they will be played in sequential order with the option to randomize playback order if you like. It takes a few seconds to load larger video files but small ones play instantly. Microsoft Video Screensaver offers two more options. One is to play the video in full screen mode and the other is to mute the sound.

The download requires a check if the operating system is a genuine one. An alternate download location would be from Softpedia. This one seems to ship without the default video from Microsoft and does not check the validation during download. I’m not sure if checks are made during installation as well.

When the screensaver is installed on your system all computers currently displaying the screensaver combine their power to create morphing abstract animations known as “sheep”.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience.

[tags]screensaver, free, electric sheep, freeware, cool[/tags]