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The Mac screensaver ecosystem's going through some interesting shifts in recent years. The permissions and stated capabilities of 3rd party software are much mo
by rezmason 2y ago
The Mac screensaver ecosystem's going through some interesting shifts in recent years. The permissions and stated capabilities of 3rd party software are much more delineated now, but screensaver modules are architected in an old NeXTSTEP kind of way, where software you trust loads and runs software you don't.
It's not visible to end users, but nowadays, Apple-authored screensavers use a private framework, and 3rd party screensavers use the traditional framework. Sometimes the traditional framework hiccups. Because these aren't essential programs, presumably they are lower priority, so it may be a while before things settle:
https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal?tab=...
https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal/wiki/Issues-with-macOS-Ventura-betas https://github.com/AerialScreensaver/ScreenSaverMinimal/wiki...
Nevertheless, here are a few more contemporary offerings:
https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-macos-screensavers https://github.com/agarrharr/awesome-macos-screensavers
And here's mine from last year! Got another one in the works.
https://github.com/Rezmason/Iconic https://github.com/Rezmason/Iconic
- jimmydoe 2y agoThank you for the list. I found the pong saver I was missing. Your saver looks cool too! Looking forward to your new one.
- mnky9800n 2y agoHow do you learn this magic?
- rezmason 2y agoIt helps that other people struggled with this macOS Ventura era stuff out in the open, so when my QA tester (hi dad!) told me my screensaver was misbehaving in System Settings, the discourse came up in GitHub's search results. Oh— and when researching for Iconic, I dug up BackSpace for NeXTSTEP and learned how OS X's ScreenSaver.framework came about. Devs distributing modules they produced for other devs' projects was much more prevalent in the early nineties! SuperSolitaire II, for instance, accepted a ".solitaire" program module and shipped a separate set of varieties: https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/games/card/_SuperSolitaireModules.NIHS.b/SuperSolitaireModules/ https://ftp.nice.ch/pub/next/games/card/_SuperSolitaireModul...
- egypturnash 2y agoDamn, that explains a lot. Thanks, Apple!