Quickies for Screen Savers

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General

• Easier Development of Screen Savers [permalink]
  When you're writing a screen saver, do you find yourself often copying the basted thing to your ~/Library/Screen Savers folder? If so, you can make a symbolic link that points to your screen saver bundle, and that will automatically get used whenever you engage the screen saver engine. e.g.

  % cd ~/Library/Screen Savers
  % ln -s ~/Projects/MonkeySaver/build/Debug/MonkeySaver.saver .
  

• Finding my resources [permalink]
  To find resources (say an image) from within the screensaver, use NSBundle bundleForClass. So, to get atomsymbol.jpg you would do something like

         NSBundle *bundle;
         NSString *path;
  
         bundle = [NSBundle bundleForClass: [self class]];
         path = [bundle pathForResource: @"atomsymbol"  ofType: @"jpg"];
         image = [[NSImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile: path];

• How about a simple sample or two? [permalink]
  There's SimpleSaver, a minimal 'bounce a line around the screen' screensaver. FullScreenSaver is the same thing, but it bounces the line around the user's desktop instead of just a black screen. Also check out Drip, a little more sophisticated (even has a configuration panel).

• How do I set the name that's displayed in the preference panel? [permalink]
  The "Product Name" setting on the Project Builder target has that. Change it by:
  1. open the Targets pane in Project Builder
  2. double-click on your target
  3. go to the Build Settings tab
  4. Edit your Product Name under General Settings

• Where is my preference file? [permalink]
  The screen saver preference file lives in the ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost directory. The name of the file is the name that you pass to defaultsForModuleWithName:, followed by .someBigNumber.plist.

  So, on my machine,

      userPrefs = [ScreenSaverDefaults defaultsForModuleWithName: @"BWDrip"];

  creates a file /Users/bork/Library/Preferences/ByHost/BWDrip.0003931024a6.plist

Random

• Running a screensaver as your desktop background [permalink]
  In a terminal, run

  % /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background &

  (all one command)

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