Pollen ScreenSaver v0.94b
Written by Matthew Caldwell, ©
2001-3 cloak & dagger ltd
What is it?
Pollen is a simple particle-system screensaver for
Mac OS X. A bunch of "pollen" particles are moved around by various
forces, producing a variety of drifting and swarming motions. The
particles can also optionally gather to form a logo or image. If you
like this sort of thing (obviously I do) it can be completely
mesmerising; if not, there are plenty of other screensavers out there.
There will probably be a Windows version eventually, because several
of my friends have asked for one. If you'd like to see such a thing,
drop me a line. No idea when I'll get around to it, though. I hate
Windows programming.
System Requirements
Mac OS X on a reasonably fast Macintosh computer with hardware-accelerated
OpenGL. For reference, Pollen runs like a charm on a 500MHz Titanium G4,
and dies like a dog on a 233MHz Wall Street G3.
NB: This version was built and tested on OS X 10.2.2. There is no good reason
it shouldn't run with earlier OS X versions, but it hasn't been tested on them.
If you encounter problems, please let me know so that I can try to sort
them out.
Installation
Place the Pollen.saver file into the
Library/Screen Savers folder of your choice. Select Pollen from the list
of savers in the System Preferences Screen Saver panel.
Logo
Pollen is set to display its own logo by default, but you can configure it to use
any other suitable image through the preferences panel. Image loading (and file dialog
filtering) is handled by Apple's NSImage class, which should be able to handle most
common image file types including PICT, TIFF, BMP, JPEG and PDF.
The colour in the top-left pixel of the image is used as the background colour.
By default, Pollen only treats pixels which are this exact colour as being part
of the background. If you want it to treat a wider range of colours as background,
select the Skip Colours Near BG checkbox in the configuration dialog; this
will often look better, especially if you are using the image colours rather than
the default Pollen colour scheme (thanks to Monroe Williams for this suggestion).
There must be a reasonable number of non-background pixels in the image or the logo
will not be shown.
The image is used at its natural size, not scaled to the screen, so be sure to
pick an image that fits nicely onscreen with some space around it. A logo will
usually look better when represented by a larger number of motes, but that may
affect performance: play with this until you are happy
(or give up and throw it away).
Multiple Screens
Pollen may have problems with some multiple screen setups, and performance
is likely to be poor since a separate copy is run for each screen. You may
prefer to have Pollen render only to your main screen, leaving all other
screens blank; hence the checkbox in the configuration dialog (as of
version 0.92b). If you continue to have multiple screen problems even with
this preference checked, please send in a bug report.
Issues
This is beta-quality software and may exhibit all manner
of problems. In particular, the handling of logo images is not very
sophisticated and will probably fail in some circumstances. Performance
will either be good for you or not; if not, there isn't much you can do
about it. If you discover any bugs, please report them to
matt@burn.demon.co.uk,
including as much detail about the symptoms and
your system as you can. I don't promise to do anything about them, but
it's a dead cert I won't if I don't know about them.
Small Print
Pollen is freeware: it may be copied and
distributed freely, but not sold. It remains copyright ©2001-3 by cloak &
dagger ltd. It is supplied as-is with no warranty or guarantee of any
kind, and no responsibility will be accepted by the author or by cloak &
dagger ltd for any damage or problems caused directly or indirectly by
its use. Handle with care.