[b*tchy]

Some wacky ideas:

1. How about one in which you give it a url and it does a random walk through the web, gathering images (maybe with the ability to exclude ads and to only include images over a certain size).... could be interestingly random.

2. How about one to scroll MacSurfer headlines!

3. How about one one in which a 3D cube filled with little balls spins. The balls get shaken around according to the laws of physics.

4. What about an itunes module that reads screensaver modules and speeds/slows them down according to the music.

5. What about a screensaver that takes a streaming video source and puts it onscreen (there are a variety of feeds)...

6. How about one that takes webcam or firewire input and sticks it on screen.

7. How about one that grabs random lines of text from text files on your HD.

8. I'd like an active antfarm.

9. Fishtank is a classic. A really good open gl one would be cool.

[geran]

I would like to see a screensaver that display water, like the intro movie. would be very nice.

Yes water with rain would be very nice.

Having the water pulse when music is being played would be nicer.

I also wish someone with skillz would start porting electric sheep:
http://www.electricsheep.org/

Other ideas:

1. Spinning earth, with real photos from weather satellites over a wireframe. (saw this on a linux box at CalTech once)--super cool.

2. Realistic growing trees and forest (with an option to save the forest and resume on the next

3. Hooking into Golem would be great:
http://golem03.cs-i.brandeis.edu/download.html

4. Ditto for Moneybee:
http://www.moneybee.de/

5. A screensaver that allowed us to hook into any particular url of an image would be great for--grabbing info from webcams, sat images...that kind of thing.

6. A screensaver that hooked into gnuetella and showed all the various search terms people are using scrolling up the screen at high speed might be fascinating (or scary).

7. A screensaver showing the hex/ascii contents of an HD scrolling by might be cool.

8. A spinning 3D image of Bill Gates' head (with an occassional pie hit or explosion) would be nice.

7. The Mac playing chess against itself would be cool.

8. Pulling headlines from slashdot/reuters would be useful.

9. Displaying net packets in some sort of graphical way might be of interest. (when you get back to your computer you can see if people have been trying to break in)...

10. 3D wireframe rockem-sockem robots doing battle would be nice.

[tie]

Originally posted by themexican:
I also wish someone with skillz would start porting electric sheep:
http://www.electricsheep.org/

It looks like it just needs a way to play mpegs? Can Quicktime do this?

[Edit: Actually, it already compiles and installs perfectly. When I try to run it (in twm), it says Command not found: Xsetbg (or something like that). It sounds like it's trying to set the desktop, like for a screen-saver, but can't. Anyways, even if someone can get it working through Xwindows, it'd be nicer to have it a real screen-saver, and the mpeg player included uses Xwindows]

[This message has been edited by tie (edited 05-27-2001).]

How about one that shows ethernet or internet traffic in some visual form...even a simple wave graph would be cool...

Or more evil, one that sniffs out ethernet traffic and shows you the pictures/text flying around the network.

[TheBarty]

How about one that would display Stock Tickers ?
I sent an email a few days ago to Paul Haddad, Author of excellent PTHStockTicker, to ask for a screensaver version but no answer as of today.

[Cowdog]

how about, if you haven't seen them before, any one of these (hint hint email the author): http://reallyslick.demonews.com/

sky rockets looks really cool

[geran]

Originally posted by Cowdog:
how about, if you haven't seen them before, any one of these (hint hint email the author): http://reallyslick.demonews.com/

sky rockets looks really cool

These savers looks so cool. But I dont think the author will port them. The savers are for Win only and he have not put the source for them out. A good programmer should mail him and ask for the source to make a mac port.

How about a screensaver for those of us with cams/video attatched that basically works like a timelapse movie camera.

When there is movement a frame is added to a list of frames. When there is no movement the collected frames are either played movie style or dissolved into each other one by one (user choice).

Prefs should set how many frames are recorded. This could be very cool.... would be nice to see what is happening at the computer while we are away.

----
edit...just reread the thread and see that this is b*tchy's #6. Well,... great minds and all that. Well, I guess I second the idea.

[This message has been edited by themexican (edited 05-30-2001).]

[King Kong]

How about a screensaver that can play itunes visualizer modules?

[Alexander Griekspoor]

Hi there,

I'm really impressed by the slick screensavers mentioned above and hope that someone is able to port them to OS X or at least gets inspired by them and makes similar ones. I'm not a programmer (yet ;-) ) but maybe I can motivate some people by giving this url at which a number of OpenGL tutorials can be found. The thumbnails already start to look like those of slick screensavers after the 4th or 5th tutorial. So please be inspired and start making those impressive and stunning screensavers!

http://nehe.gamedev.net/opengl.asp

BTW there is a screensaver competition going on at Stepwise/Codefab: http://www.stepwise.com/Contests/2001-04/rules.html
With screensavers like these you will make a good chance of winning!
Good luck!

Check out this page:
http://wildtangent.com/candy/screensavers.html

While these screensavers are PC only (WildTangent is a DirectX 3D plug in), some of the ideas might be cribbed/made better in OpenGL.

Particularly good are butterfly and dreamsaver.

Also I think it's high time a really advanced fishbowl saver is developed...maybe one in which various breeds of fish play in a game of life.

[limbotron]

I like the idea of taking video from a camera or firewire whenever there is movement and adding frames to a timelapse video...that way you can see what happened around your computer while you were gone...