Software

Welcome

Hi there, and thank you for trying my screen saver. FadingImages is a plugin for the Mac OS X screen saver engine that displays the images from a specified location scattered across your screen and slowly fades them out. It will cycle through all the images before repeating, but since they fade at different rates you will over time end up with different images - and always in different locations and scales.

Requirements

Fading Images should run on any machine with Mac OS X 10.3 or later and is Universal.

Installation

To install, just double-click the FadingImages.saver file.

If this is a new installation, System Preferences will launch and you'll be asked whether you want to install just for yourself or for all users. If you're not currently logged in as an administrative user and want to install for everyone you will be asked to authenticate.

If you're installing over an existing copy of FadingImages, you'll be notified that it already exists and asked if you really want to replace it. If you opt to replace a copy that's installed for all users and aren't an admin, you'll be asked for credentials.

Use

Screen savers in Mac OS X have two modes of operation. The common one is to use it as a screen obscurer/exerciser when you're not actively using your machine. For that behavior, just select the FadingImages entry from the list in System Preferences, configure it with the "Options…" button if necessary, and let it go.

Alternatively, you can run a screen saver module on your desktop - over any desktop image you have, but beneath all windows and icons. I've provided AppleScript applications to start and stop FadingImages in this mode. Once started it runs almost entirely within your video card - takes only about 2% of the CPU on my 600MHz G3 - so it shouldn't really impact your machine's responsiveness to run this way.

Licensing

FadingImages is, I think appropriately, postcard-ware. If you decide to keep and use it, please send a postcard from where you are to where I am. That'd be:

Greg Weston
PO Box 54
Avon CT 06001-0054
USA

If you really want to give me money, I'm certainly not averse to it. Donations in whatever amount you consider worthwhile can be sent to the same address or via PayPal to gweston@mac.com.

Support

If you have any questions or suggestions regarding FadingImages, please send mail to support@splook.com with, preferably, a subject line that includes the name "FadingImages." If, for example, there's any interest in having the desktop mode work with your existing desktop image rather than a black background, let me know. Updates will always be available at this site.

Acknowledgments

I'd like to thank user Daniel P. for taking the time to contact me and run several test builds get v1.1 working more efficiently and on a wider range of machines.