One of the things I find disappointing about OSX screensavers is that 95% of them don’t treat dual or triple monitor setups as one large area. Instead they will either draw on the main screen only, or just run a separate instance for each monitor. This makes it look like I have two or three separate computers instead of one large workspace.
The Desktop & Screen Saver module in Preferences in has an option for “Main Screen Only”, in part to make the ugly look bearable, and in part because some screen savers have a nasty habit of never being tested on multiple monitor setups and crashing when running under that configuration.
To help put an end to this, I ported WanderingPolygon, a ScreenSaver that I wrote for NeXTSTEP in 1991 to run as a true “multiple monitor” screen saver. A 3 to 9 sided polygon wanders across all your monitors, while cycling through a smooth ribbon of colors. While I have only been able to test on a dual monitor setup, it should be able to deal correctly with any arrangement of one or more monitors. I even tested it with non-contigous monitor setups.
The source for the screen saver can be downloaded as zip file (WanderingPolygon.zip). The source includes the orginal 1991 release as well. When I get a moment I’ll add it to the public SVN repository.
If you want to just download the binary module, you can download that as a zip file as well (WanderingPolygon.saver.zip)
The source was pounded out in just an hour or so, most of which was spent running through various test scenarios, so it isn’t particularly pretty, and there are no configurable options except through recompiling, but it should be easy ti figure out how to adapt this for other screen savers. In the next day or so I hope to write a more thorough technical description for those interested in developing multiple monitor savers.
If you have any questions in the mean time, you can drop me an email at karl@karlkraft.com
