I’m a little behind on today’s Leopard Feature Presentation, and I apologize for that. However, today’s feature focus is on the various new screen savers that come bundled with Leopard. This is a mostly casual commentary review, noting that there’s not too much to say about screen savers, if you know what I mean.

Leopard brings along three new screen savers, two new presentation styles for photo screen savers, and a few other options. A number of the existing screen savers now have advanced options available for those that care enough to make their screen saver absolutely perfect. For example, the infamous Flurry screen saver now includes options for color cycle, streams, thickness, and speed.

My favorite new screen saver, and the one that I’m using now, is called Arabesque. I don’t know why it’s called that because according to Wikipedia, arabesque art is traditional Muslim art based on geometric shapes. About the only thing that this screen saver adheres to is the “geometric” idea. To be honest, the screen saver looks a lot more like a cross between the artwork for Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Server. It’s essentially like little, semi-transparent, colored bubbles that do various things, but in my opinion, it looks really cool.

Another new screen saver, called Shell, should probably be called Kaleidoscope because that’s really what it looks like. You get to see really cool looking kaleidoscope-style designs. Which is probably better than a Shell screen saver that suggests that you’re looking at UNIX code coming from the shell. Eeeek!

For all those logophiles out there, there’s also a Word of the Day screen saver. Bearing significant resemblance to the RSS Visualizer screen saver that premiered in Tiger, this screen saver shows off a word and its definition while other words translucently fly by in the background. However, this isn’t exactly a Word of the Day, as the screen saver picks a different word each time the screen saver starts. Pressing the D key lets you see the more detailed definition.

However, Apple has introduced a number of new view modes for Pictures screen savers. Apple includes about a half a dozen sample pictures screen savers (most of which have been in OS X since 10.0), and of course, any pictures from your iPhoto library can serve as picture screen savers as well. However, in addition to the classic Ken Burns effect slideshow, there are now two more options. One of them shows off laying pictures down on a table in a random assortment, which looks pretty interesting. However, Apple went all out in the “mosaic” style, which starts with a picture from your slideshow, then gradually zooms out on it, revealing a number of other pictures (which it takes from all your picture collections, not just from the screen saver you may happen to be viewing at the time) until it eventually fades out enough to reveal a mosaic of another picture in the slideshow. Then that picture starts zooming out again! I mean, that’s REALLY cool.

And another nice thing that the Leopard screen savers include is the ability to display a clock overlay on your screen saver, which I personally find quite handy.

Core Animation is the real driving power behind the new Leopard screen savers, and though these new ones are nice, I’m really looking forward to seeing what will be coming next from Core Animation-powered screen savers, be they from Apple or independent developers.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: color, Core Animation, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, mosaic, pictures, review, screen savers