Talamathi

About nine months ago, I wrote about how to make a Mac screen saver to show your uptime , using Quartz Composer , a package from Fink , and Quartz Composer patch called Shell Command Patch . Not long after , Apple released Leopard , which seems to have changed Quartz Composer enough to break Shell Command. I was getting all geared up on writing a post about doing this using another method (completely redoing it and everything), but looking in to this further just showed me I’m an idiot. It turns out the difficulty I was having is that Quartz Composer patches are saved in different locations. To be clearer: In Tiger (10.4), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Patches/ . In Leopard (10.5), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/ or ~/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/ . That’s it. Seriously. Incidentally, I found this information at Kineme.net’s page on the topic . The new version of the Developer Tools does in fact come with an example p...

In a previous post , I detailed how to make a Mac screen saver that showed off your uptime. With the advent of Leopard , things have changed enough in Quartz Composer so that the Shell Command Patch does not work. When I get a chance, I’ll see about updating it, but for now it does not work. Technorati Tags: Mac , screen+saver , uprecords

I am not all that big about screen savers, what with the fact they don’t save screens any more. On the other hand, it can be a good warning that the screen is about to turn off if you do not actually want it to. As such, a nice simple screen saver can still be useful. Blanking to black is fine, but why not make it a little nice? For a couple of years (at least), I have used a screen saver called ShowOff . The whole purpose is to keep track of your best uptime, and shows your current uptime. There are a lot problems with it, though: It has not been updated since January of 2006. It only records uptimes when the screen saver is running Editing the font requires hand-editing the plist file. It occasionally records a random value, thus making it useless. To handle the last problem, I have been keeping a copy of the preferences and using it to replace the wrong one. Sufficed to say, this is less than optimal. So I decided to go about and make my own. I do have a goal of learning Obje...