I remember in the original version you had all sorts of options, and could even combine screensavers.
For people who may not remember: screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long - leaving a shadow of the static image permanently. Screensavers kicked in after a few minutes and displayed something dynamic so as to save your screen from burn in.
In the 90's, having a cool custom screensaver was cool (around the same time that having a custom ringtone on your 3210 was cool), and you'd pay money for software like After Dark.
Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it.
Second best is the nyan cat screensaver.
Currently have an Apple image gallery of space themed pictures.
It was dumb harmless fun.
Later that day, I read in one of the trade rags about a columnist talking about the efficacy of a bluescreen screensaver.
1+1 = 2
Less than an hour later, most of it spent transcribing the bluescreen text output, I had a BSOD screensaver. Released it to the company intranet and waited for the ensuing hilarity.
Wasn't long before the guys in the build lab took advantage of the screensaver.
They installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard.
The main dev on the project comes in, sees the bluescreen and proceeds to restart the computer! Oops.
A few years later, on another multi-year large software project at this PNW tech company, the morning that the software was supposed to be signed off and released to manufacturing, the build lab, different group of people, installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard on the dogfood server for the project.
When the project manager arrived, he went to check on the status of the server, only to find the BSOD. This time a server restart was averted.
So, it's all fun and games until a server is hard rebooted.
Same here - including myself, when I came back from a bathroom break to find it had landed on the MacOS error screen.
Sounds pretty much completely accurate.
A bit off topic, but I also miss the screen obliterating hammer we used to play with as kids. Any modern, web rendition of that piece of stress-reliever?
I used to use this program that flashed the screen white and black rapidly and it would clear it up in about an hour.
Haven’t seen any trouble in a few years, is this a solved problem now?
Why didn't we just show a black image?
Same thing with switching monitors off after work.
Though same screensavers would run for a while and then switch the monitor to power saving mode, effectively turning it off.
I know one of the authors of Flying Toasters and sent him the link. Here's what he had to say:
"It's a rough approximation, which is super cool, but misses all of the nuance.
"You see, back in the day, there were very strong competitors to After Dark that had as much or more animations. The thing that set After Dark was a "je ne sais quoi" that felt like an elevated experience. Both the customers & the competitors thought this was some sort of accident, or that the animations were important, but neither of these things was true.
"The secret was that people loved the nuance of interacting with the product (& subtlety in the animations) and it was very carefully designed with cognitive science. I pushed the team very hard before I would let anything be released because I insisted on the nuance."
There was also an amazing set of screensavers which I don't remember the name of, but one of the set was called 'kaos', and a lot of them were based on fractals. If anyone recalls the name of that software...
[edit] I found it! DarkSide of the Mac by Tom Dowdy. Brilliant. http://poubelle.com/DarkSideDocs.html
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Castaway
[1] https://uxdesign.cc/the-tale-of-johnny-castaway-the-legendar...
[2] http://nivs.dk/jc/ (open source recreation project)
[3] https://genesistemple.com/johnny-castaway-no-johnny-is-an-is...
Just wild to think of having to go through all of that for something you can download in less than a few milliseconds today.
I need this on a shirt. And in a plaque on my desk at the office. And framed at home.
https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/rainstorm.html
takes <40% of idle low range gaming GPU = nothing, but 30% of one gaming 4GHz CPU thread, what is going on there? Chrome GPU process jumps between 20 an 40% while sliding 6 bitmaps around, something you could even do on a Virge in 1996.
Some time ago I noticed an older 3GHz i5 laptop, otherwise perfectly usable, would start to struggle decoding h264 webcam stream because webmaster decided to use CSS animation for a scrolling title bar superimposed over video feed.
Many of your customers won't have top-notch systems.
I wonder if there's some unnecessary reflow going on here? (reflow forces animations to happen on the CPU instead of the GPU)
You can edit
.rain {top: -4800px;
Hmm, maybe its reading buffer back from GPU and compositing in software? I did an experiment and deleted 5 of the 6 DIVs reducing load to 100MB/s fillrate and CPU utilization didnt even budge .... so Chrome is doing something stupid like reading GPU buffer back to main memory and pushing it to GPU again. This explains why my older i5 laptop was so loaded by stupid tiny text scroll.
(Flying toaster images came apparently from there.)
EDIT: or even better
document.getAnimations().forEach(animation => animation.playbackRate = 0.1)
A link to the original guide and the modified steps I used: https://gist.github.com/atommclain/863e5cd47ab714c1e4e966606...
Perhaps you need to adapt your work to actually render on an NSView first ...
I seem to remember there being a city skyline screensaver as well, was there an After Dark 2?
Paint, PowerPoint, even screensavers. Counting elements, making bets with my brother which will appear more often. Pointing fingers at the screen in the hopes nothing will touch it.
Good times.
Sure, it was in B&W instead of color, but when a bigger fish collided with a smaller fish, he'd eat it!
Edit: here's a video where someone (who was probably -20 years old when it came out) demos it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyLtenNh7Sc
What's funny is that these screensavers were _expensive_, and thus people pirated them. I remember the most active warez BBS in area had a whole file section dedicated to screensavers.
There was also a Windows (3.x) version.
Obviously, warp.