After my debacle with the monitor this week, I decided that I needed a new screensaver. Primarily I was thinking of disabling the login display when returning to the OS from the screensaver, but I have been thinking I wanted something more for a while now. And since my new monitor does not recover from power-save mode, I need something good to prevent the burn-in that I saw on the monitor at Best Buy.
I’ve been using the basic My Pictures slideshow screensaver that comes with Windows XP for a while. I have a lot of pictures, and the kids like to see my computer showing them photos of us on all of our vacations. Abby actually asked me why I had changed my screensaver once, which prompted me to restore the photo one.
The thing is, the one that comes with Windows is pretty lame. It’ll only show photos on one monitor at a time, unless you turn on the “animation” feature, which simply drags the single photo across all three screens very slowly. I’m looking for something that does a little bit more.
One of the more cool multi-monitor screensavers I tried displays an old-school BOB (you might call it “particle”) animation. It’s neat because it centers on the center monitor, and spreads over all three like its supposed to.
Most screensavers will only work on the primary monitor. If they work on multiple monitors they often only work on the monitors attached to the primary graphics card. Rarely do they show different content on all three monitors.
Today I downloaded Google’s screensaver application. It does some animation/crossfading, but I guess my second card isn’t quite up to snuff, at least not for non-DirectX animation. Still, it does a nifty Polaroid-style photo pile on all three monitors, which is much better than what the Microsoft screensaver does.
What I’d really like is some slow-zooming/panning crossfades. Simple transitions. It would be neat if larger pictures could be displayed as faded or black and white across the entire 3-monitor background, and several smaller versions of different photos could face in and pan across them simultaneously. And it would be ultimately cool if I could get a little animated information on there, too.
I’ve liked the screensaver one of the guys I’ve met through work uses on his Mac. It displays a list of unread email subjects. It would be swell if I could get an RSS feed or email subjects somewhere on the vast expanse of monitors on my desk along with the photos.
My new computer is supposed to arrive on Tuesday. It should be able to push DirectX pixels to all three (four, if I get another one) monitors without any issue. So a working screensaver that did what I want would be nice. I hope I don’t have to write my own.
And hey - Why is it so hard to create a simple software catalog? There are a bazillion software listing sites on the net, and they all suck so much. Just looking at some will make your eyes bleed, they’re that poorly designed. Maybe that’s the problem, people see how poor the existing sits are, and then insist on making their own poor site. Well, I’ll try not to fall into that trap.
