Simon Heys
Screensavr
So here it is, one month on: the first Mac-native Cocoa version. Built on ObjectiveFlickr.
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Great idea! But the performance is really bad (low framerate and high CPU load)
I’ve had some (a lot) of experience with 2D pixel pushing on the mac os. Take a look at this (unfortunately dead) project; http://trac.hunch.se/PhotoFeeder, where we had to do alot of performance tweeking. You will want to have a look at this in particular: http://trac.hunch.se/PhotoFeeder/browser/trunk/Core/PFMain.m#L637
Using Quartz Composer was actually the best alternative, both considering performance and ease of use. We met one of Apples 2D/3D developers actually, and he also recommended using QC before implementing everything yourself in OpenGL (as we did earlier).
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And! Have a look at “Display Links” – very good for rendering synchronized with display hardware.
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Hi Rasmus – thanks for your comments and example code. Your screensaver is far more advanced than mine! Love the ‘providers’ idea, makes a lot of sense and something I could easily implement as I have a similar mechanism already.
I am just learning Objective C, this is really my first effort. I have talked to other programmers about using Core Graphics – at the moment I’m just using NSImage as my way of ‘getting it to work’… I wouldn’t dare show you the source…
Also interesting that you mention Quartz Composer; I hadn’t seriously thought it could so something like this but might be worth giving it a go. If you know of any good online Quartz Composer learning resources I’d love to know.
Thanks again.
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Great work on the screensaver – really like it. Can I make a suggestion though – have it subscribe to the ‘Interestingness’ feed on Flickr so that it doesn’t get attached to our screenname?
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Hi Christian – thanks for the comment. One day I may revisit the options on the screensaver saver, as I agree it could be much more thorough. One nice suggestion was to use a plug-in architecture so that any image source could be used (e.g. fffound, or your iPhoto library). It would be a lot of work though so I’m saving it as a project for a rainy day…
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Hey mate, it runs great, but on 2 screens, i’m getting weird occurrences where the same image will show twice, even three times in a row.
Performance is great though, running on 2 monitors with high quality images, it’s as smooth as a pedo in a chat room.
7 March 2007
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